Creating the fuel requires energy, the best supply of high volume, high quality CO2 neutral energy is electricity derived from carbon neutral sources (solar, wind, tidal, etc).

Why would you take perfectly good electricity, use it to create a synthetic liquid fuel using a lossy process (some energy will be lost as heat), then burn that fuel to extract, at most, 25% of the energy you used to create the fuel. Rather than just taking the electricity, putting it in a battery, and running an electric motor. A process that’s 70%-90% efficient.

The cost difference between EVs and ICE cars would have to be astronomical to make synthetic fuel ICE cars appealing when compared to EVs.

There still a use case for synthetic fuels, but that only in situations where you already have a large ICE fleet (could be cars, trucks, ships, planes) that are very expensive to replace, or where batteries don’t mix well with the form of transport (aircraft for example). But for _new_ passenger vehicles, where EVs are basically a solved problem, I can’t see how a new ICE + synthetics fuel could possibly hope to compete with a new EV + electricity.

When one approach is half as efficient as the other, it hard to see how you build a cost competitive product using the less efficient approach. Especially when the more efficient approach is already approaching price parity, with a much cheaper technology (diesel from the ground is much cheaper than diesel from the air).

OTOH, Lithium is easy to recycle, and a car only uses ~50kg of it.

A combustion engine throws away >70% of that costly green energy, whereas EVs are 90+% efficient. The more panels/turbines/batteries you need to do the same job, the more pollution is emitted in the manufacturing step.

We need solutions that reduce the huge amount of green energy supply needed to go 100% carbon-free, not self-futile solutions that push the finish line further away.