This is not an entirely uncommon business model, and there are numerous examples of the developers of a technology licensing it for production and distribution. ARM is itself one example of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Ltd.#Business_model
It is entirely valid for a technology inventor to commercialize their invention by partnering with a manufacturer that already has the necessary production capacity, rather than by raising outside money to scale up their company and build new production capacity. The former can often be a lower-risk, higher-reward approach compared to the latter.
The real question is whether the technology actually works. If they can prove it works, the fact that they would license this technology to third parties for manufacturing and distribution is not itself suspicious at all.
I mean, I think this is pretty standard in highly capital intensive industries?
Can someone explain the maximum theoretical efficiency of this process from basic thermodynamic principles?
This is converting electricity into kinetic energy and vice versa. So it'd be the product of those two maximum efficiencies, whatever they are.
Where do you get that from? The article definitely seems to me to be describing a heat engine.
That said plenty of the steps involved here are likely not 100% efficient, and I'm somewhat unsure where they're recovering the energy involved in the gas-liquid phase-transition, if at all.
However, the key information will be performance numbers actually coming out of it
Do you actually need to refrigerate it to keep it liquid? My SodaStream machine works with room temperature.
So depending where you are you'd need refrigeration
The refrigeration is needed because the process of compression produced huge amount of heat. And because of that, this method of storing energy is twice less efficient than batteries are
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/physics/chapter/13-5-phase...
However, I imagine you could wait for your too-hot-to-condense gas to cool and condense. That would probably be vastly more efficient than adding refrigeration.
It would depend on the materials used for the pressure tank, whether you can add more surface area and the external temperature.
You could even put the CO2 Tank under water in a deep lake/ocean. Then you don't have to have such thick materials to contain the pressure. The CO2 could be dissipating its heat and pressurizing as you pump it down (use a flexible tube so the water is compressing the CO2). For the return journey, use a rigid pipe so it doesn't lose energy pushing outward on a flexible pipe.
EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_carbon_dioxide, you can't slosh it.
and here we are
Concerning:
> The engineer explains that Energy Dome does not want to build projects itself.
> “We don’t have the capability to grow as fast as the market requires,” he says. “So our model is to license the technology to EPC companies or IPPs, utilities, the final user, because that is the best way for us to expand geographically and by sector.
They are so confident in the economics of this tech that they'd rather someone else invest in it. How generous and not at all suspicious.