Theranos never produced a working prototype of a microfluidic measurement device that could do what they were claiming, and their investors were foolish enough to pour their money in without doing that basic due diligence, for various reasons that have been well-dissected in the past.
I think here they would really have to get a working prototype / pilot plant up and running, with a transparent demonstration. That's how the Haber process got support from Bosch c. 1909.
Generally speaking however, industrial processes run with pure streams of ingredients are more efficient. The rate-limiting step in the process as they describe it looks like the first one, because they're just using 400 ppm CO2 air as the input, with no pre-concentration. You'd need some kind of energy return on energy investment, i.e. how much electricity input per liter of produced fuel, plus lifetime of the catalyst etc. to make sense of how plausible it is.
I think here they would really have to get a working prototype / pilot plant up and running, with a transparent demonstration. That's how the Haber process got support from Bosch c. 1909.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Haber_process
Generally speaking however, industrial processes run with pure streams of ingredients are more efficient. The rate-limiting step in the process as they describe it looks like the first one, because they're just using 400 ppm CO2 air as the input, with no pre-concentration. You'd need some kind of energy return on energy investment, i.e. how much electricity input per liter of produced fuel, plus lifetime of the catalyst etc. to make sense of how plausible it is.