I'm also fairly sure electrical flight will be a thing long before we get to the last 3.5% of fossil fuel use anywhere on earth. Gasoline isn't magic, it's just something that we had a lot of lying around and didn't punish people for polluting and killing people with it, because the people with access to it became politically influential. That's it's only unique advantage, which thankfully seems to finally be fading.
How long ago were EVs totally impossible because of the amazing energy density of gasoline? Like 5 years maybe, and now that's laughable. EVs are clearly better. Did gasoline get suddently less energy dense in that period or was that always just BS supported by nothing more than status quo bias?
In vehicles, energy density is not terribly important. The issue has always been the price of the cells. Only very recently they started becoming cost competitive compared to ICE powered vehicles.
The situation is very different in airplanes. At takeoff, something like 40% of the total mass of an airliner is just fuel. The best Li-ion cells have something like 50 times lower energy density than kerosine. It is simply not possible to fly any useful distance with such a low energy density.
And he literally wrote a book published in 2015 on the topic of energy density.
So I'm glad it's obvious now with 20/20 hindsight, but it seems a lot of people can be wrong about this stuff and have their opinions promoted.
https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2667/...
but tomorrow, in that we expect a lot of growth in aviation. That might not be the case, why take a lover for a weekend to Paris when you can go to Montréal? A nuclear powered aircraft carrier could synthesize jet fuel from the ocean and atmosphere and even if it is $15 a gallon it is a bargain -- so the US Military sponsors this kind of research.
The best case for carbon capture now is this technology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_...
applied to sugar cane alcohol factories in Brazil. You can catch CO2 from fermentation and not have to separate it from N2, compress to 1500 psi and inject into a saline aquifer. Those bioenergy plants are much better than bioenergy plants in the US by any economic or environmental metric. They'd have to get paid something per ton of CO2 captured to make it worth it. This industry is located close to populated areas such as São Paulo and does no harm to rainforests that Brazil must also protect.
Another case is the petrochemical industry in the southern US where CO2 streams are abundant and could be aggregated for scalable saline injection.
Any sort of space manufacturing will require a "circular economy" for carbon (it's precious) and whatever passes for a "petrochemical factory" will produce CO2 and that needs to have energy put into it into some form that can be put back into the "head end", methane would be great. The unique opportunity there is very high temperature chemistry with 24-7 sunlight concentrated with metallized plastic membranes made from the produce of the "petrochemical factory".