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Re:Directly converting CO2 into a gasoline fuel (2017) by ZeroGravitas on Thursday March 10, 2022 @11:17AM (#30628597)
I'm optimistic about turquoise hydrogen, which is effectively the same thing as your bioenergy link, except you don't burn the biofuel then capture the CO2 you just remove solid carbon from it, and use the hydrogen as a chemical feedstock (or, if really, really necessary and there's literally no other option, as a fuel). And the key reason that would be better, is because burning biofuel is kind of crappy, just like burning fossil fuel is, and you're better off just directly using the cheap renewable electrical energy that you're going to waste seperating and storing the CO2 you create.

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?

Re:Directly converting CO2 into a gasoline fuel (2017) by fsh on Thursday March 10, 2022 @11:56AM (#30629153)
No, EVs were not "totally impossible" 5 years ago. The first GM EV1s with NiMH batteries were produced 23 years ago, and the first Tesla roadsters with Li-ion batteries 14 years ago. The battery capacity and weight of the roadster are not dramatically different from that of modern EVs.

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.

Re:Directly converting CO2 into a gasoline fuel (2017) by ZeroGravitas on Thursday March 10, 2022 @02:08PM (#30631059)
Famous and highly cited energy theorist Vaclav Smil was still calling them an overhyped dead end 5 years ago, a decade ago he said "The myth that the future belongs to electric cars is one of the original misconceptions of the modern energy era".

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.