There is much progress being made in decreasing the cost of EVs and cleaning up our grid by installing more solar and wind. There has been not nearly as much progress in the production of cheap cellulosic ethanol or fuel based on algae.

There are a lot of Exxon commercials talking about algae-based fuels, but in reality we are still just making our ethanol from corn (which most agree is not a good idea). Given the momentum behind EVs and their other benefits (lower maintenance costs, less noise, no emissions, etc.), I would rather my tax dollars go towards accelerating the push for electrification than push for a transition to biofuels.

Creating synthetic fuel requires a lot of resources. Growing it has a massive environmental impact and the necessary farm area would be very large. Solar cells would require a fraction of the area and can be put onto roofs or into areas not suitable for farming. Synthetic fuels also don't fix the efficiency problems of combustion engines. So electric cars would require only a fraction of the effort to be powered compared to combustion engine cars with synthetic fuels. On top of this, synthetic fuels do not solve the exhaust problems.

The main advantage of present day internal combustion engine vehicles over electric vehicles is lower cost. Once you require carbon-neutral fuel for ICE vehicles they're actually more expensive over a typical lifetime.

There is definitely a place for carbon-neutral fuels in applications where energy density is paramount, particularly aviation and long distance shipping. There is also a niche case for fueling heavy-duty ground vehicles like large trucks. I don't think that carbon-neutral fuels are going to be cheaper than electrification for passenger vehicles and light duty trucks, though.

> It's just currently much more expensive than pumping oil from the ground.

The issue is it's also more expensive than using electric cars.

Isn’t the issue to do with consumption of gasoline rather than production? Burning carbon based fuels releases large amounts of carbon, no matter how you’ve produced it

When you produce fuels by biological means, the carbon in those fuels is captured from the atmosphere.

Thus biological fuels are carbon neutral. No new carbon is added.

(For the same reason, if you heat your home with wood, the only new carbon comes from the energy used to cut the wood down and transport it to your home. The carbon released from your chimney is neutral because the tree captured that carbon from the atmosphere while it was growing.)

That's a little simplistic. The state of the carbon is incredibly important - keeping it locked in a tree, ice or the ground instead of floating around in the atmosphere is kind of the entire goal.

Heating with wood unlocks all that essentially inert carbon into wide spread particulate, so it's no more carbon neutral than burning coal you collect by hand. You're also depleting the carbon absorption side by harvesting the tree

PS: Please don't heat with wood, it's very very polluting. There's more to pollution than just CO2.

Extracting and burning fossil fuels release carbon that is already stored in the Earth, while biofuels capture carbon from the atmosphere when the feedstock is grown then release it when the resulting fuel is burned. That is why biofuels are considered to be carbon-neutral.