If the capital costs are low enough, cheap or free spot electricity could be used, too. California regularly has excess production.
We would gradually go from coal and (natural gas) powered electric cars, to nuclear powered ICE cars.
1. Keep making more electric cars 2. Rather than throwing away ICE cars, we give them better fuel to use.
This is a very narrow-minded mistaken viewpoint. The world does have a serious problem with CO2 building up in the atmosphere. It also has energy need to sustain the current living standard and pace of development, but this is not a serious problem such as CO2! We could decide and enforce giving up the insane power consumption of today. But we cannot decide to pronounce the existing CO2 in the atmosphere and its destabilizing effect on climate to be a non-problem.
> carbon fuels are the cheapest, most abundant source of energy.
No, they are not. Carbohydrate fuel is the most convenient way to transport and use, but not the cheapest source of energy. The cheapest source of energy is renewables and possibly nuclear, if massive investments were made into infrastrusture and safety.
They could be like Tesla and build a solar arm, or a wind farm, or do geothermal. You could pull it out of the grid and it'd still be better for the environment than pulling it out of the ground.
TBH saying the world doesn't have a carbon problem contradicts all of the people fighting greenhouse gas emission based climate change so I'm curious as to your logic behind that statement.
I think it’s naive though. There is a theoretical point at which it’s economical to just build excess renewable energy production and use the extra power to repair the climate.
Currently, we use a mix of hydrocarbon, hydroelectric, photovoltaic, wind and nuclear for power generation. Photovoltaic is quite economical for daylight and so using intermittent power for this process carbon capture process seems reasonable. Broadly, this could serve as a power sink to balance solar output, a way to use renewables for transportation and a way to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. Not all of those at once but just doing some of that seems like a win.
And that’s ok, I think that such an investment could be profitable. It has plenty of positive externality effects too.
The world doesn't really have a "carbon" problem, it has an energy problem, and right now carbon fuels are the cheapest, most abundant source of energy. Even if you somehow got carbon capture to work, you're still going to have to power it - with solar, or wind, nuclear, geothermal, whatever. At that point, then the question just becomes whether using the storage medium of gas is better than the storage medium of something else, like batteries. But the article doesn't go into the core question of where the energy is coming from to turn CO2 into gas.