Hi Rob. Why bother trying to extract CO2 out of "thin air" when there are far more concentrated sources available, for example exhaust of existing power plants (100,000 ppm CO2, instead of 400 ppm)?
Point sources won't scale to the size of the problem. Easier initially, but to replace fossil fuels for transportation and heating, will need to get the CO2 from the air.
Considering a good portion of transportation and basically all of the heating can be replaced by electricity directly, you will not need to go beyond point sources anyway.
There is a much more efficient way to deal with point sources, if you have a clean energy source in their neighborhood: just shut them down and replace the energy they provide with the clean energy you would use to scrub the CO2 from the air.
Yes, sometimes this is practicable. But many locations do not have sufficient renewable energy available, and nuclear has become unpalatable for a variety of reasons.
Scrubbing CO2 from boiler or turbine exhaust takes a small fraction (5%-ish) of the energy needed to convert it into fuel. If the source is a power plant, the CO2 can be captured at a cost of efficiency penalty of around 10%.
Once it is captured, storing and transporting CO2 to a location with abundant clean energy is also relatively simple.
We use zero carbon solar and wind electricity. As long as the electricity source is zero carbon and low cost, it makes economic and practical sense to make zero carbon fuel.
They're going after the use case of gasoline as energy storage, not gasoline as primary energy production.
The reason, today, that cars are powered by gasoline and not electricity is not the cost of the energy itself, but the cost of storing it.
Obviously it would be better to use the electricity directly. But it's hard to get that electricity to a moving car on the road (or a plane in the sky).
Your "not that hard" solutions don't solve the problem you answered to. You can't move a single (production) car out there with wires in the road, or by laying tracks.
You seem pretty optimistic about the economics of your tech. Is that based on extracting CO2 from air or from more concentrated sources such as power plant flue gas?
