There was some promising research showing that you could recapture co2 and catalyze it into methane pretty efficiently. I wonder whatever happened to that.

It'd be nice if we could continue burning "fossil" fuels by recapturing and reusing. With enough solar power, the efficiencies don't matter a lot. And with reuse we wouldn't have to change any of our chemical processes or equipment that we've already built in the modern plastic era.

condensing the co2 to the necessary concentrations to drive these reactions is basically never economical - we will need widespread energy abundance before non-organic based removal becomes viable.

Don't lie. Converting burned fuel into unburned one is not as simple as oxidation-reduction reaction at all. But also the CO2 in atmosphere is spreaded. If you remind that we can mine the inert gasses from the atmosphere - the amount of energy is worth of consideration in that case.