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Re:Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to d... by bluGill on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @05:55PM (#37838143)
The processes to make synthetic fuels are well known have proven to scale to a countries needs for energy. Germany did it in WWII, South Africa did it for a while too.

The problem is it costs a lot of energy, and so it ends up 4-5 times more expensive than oil from a well.

Re:Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to d... by xoa on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @06:22PM (#37838471)
>The problem is it costs a lot of energy, and so it ends up 4-5 times more expensive than oil from a well.

The real problem there though of course is that oil from the a well has always been cheating by not pricing in its externalities. To get an apples-to-apples comparison with synthetic fuel, fossil fuel would also have to be made at a minimum [0] carbon net neutral too, such as by running an atmospheric scrubber and ensuring that for every ton of carbon coming out of the ground a ton was getting captured again in an equivalently long term stable way.

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0: Fossil fuel extraction has always resulted in a ton of other externalities too, not just in terms of massive non-carbon pollution but geopolitical costs. That itself may well be a driver, if a country can switch fully to renewable/nuclear power and then run its entire economy solely off of that via grid/batteries/synthetic hydrocarbons the security implications alone are pretty massive. No more fossil fuel blackmail from hostile regimes, ever.

Re:Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to d... by nrr on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @06:01PM (#37838207)
I've seen some presentations over the last half a decade that are trying to couple this to fission as a form of cogeneration, and the carbon capture story for the resulting hydrocarbon synthfuels is pretty compelling.
Re:Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to d... by lurgburg on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @08:48PM (#37839672)
Wasn't Germany's WWII "synthetic fuel" just coal derived gasoline?