Climate Change Tracker

Any new technology like making hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide requires the spending of a very large amount of money before becoming cost effective.

There are already several decades since almost all companies have stopped doing long-term research. Now everybody does research for things that will either become profitable next year or in any case when they are multi-year projects they are just improvements of established techniques, with known market, so that there is a very low risk that they might not be profitable.

The only way in which hydrocarbon synthesis would see the level of investment that is required for making it cost effective would be with some form of governmental intervention.

We could have had already today cost-effective hydrocarbon synthesis if a lot of money and research time would not have been wasted with research in various directions that have been considered as futile by most since the very beginning, especially for methods of hydrogen storage and for hydrogen fuel cells.

But you might not. That kind of technology is highly questionable thermodynamically. You're going to burn coal for energy and then turn the CO2 back into fuel for somehow less energy? Good luck with that. Just leave the coal in the ground where you found it.

The most promising thing in that ballpark is biofuels, but they compete with food production for farmland. Which could plausibly work for aviation but isn't likely to scale to transportation in general, much less production of electricity.

We are already able to do the conversion from solar light to electrical energy at better efficiency than the plants and sooner or later we should be able to reach similar efficiency with the plants at carbon dioxide reduction into hydrocarbons.

If someone will succeed to solve the difficulties of the direct electrolysis of CO2 or of carbonates, we may exceed the efficiency of the plants, which reduce CO2 indirectly, with hydrogen obtained by the photolysis of water.

The conversion of CO2 into hydrocarbons is precisely the only solution to the CO2 problem that cannot be questioned in any way, because it is the only solution about which it is known with certainty that it works, as anyone can see by just opening a window and looking outside.

Using energy from fossil fuels for carbon capture is so obviously absurd that nobody could do such a silly thing.

Normally any carbon capture installation must be powered by solar or wind energy, simultaneously solving the problem of the energy storage.

The energy comes from sunlight. If you actually use plants, that's biofuels.

> The conversion of CO2 into hydrocarbons is precisely the only solution to the CO2 problem that cannot be questioned in any way, because it is the only solution about which it is known with certainty that it works, as anyone can see by just opening a window and looking outside.

Anyone can also see that you can charge an electric car with solar panels and operate the entire country of France on nuclear, hydro and renewables without ever burning anything.

> Normally any carbon capture installation must be powered by solar or wind energy, simultaneously solving the problem of the energy storage.

Then you've made the economics even worse because your facility can only operate during periods of surplus generation, which everyone else will be trying to minimize by spinning down peaker plants, charging their electric cars and otherwise using competing storage technologies with lower costs.

And the fossil fuel plants are the ones you'd want to shut down during those times, which implies you'd also have to store the CO2 for later use, which requires tanks and compressors and more energy -- energy that comes out of the inefficient side of the system because you have to do that during the times you don't have surplus generation.

It's not really that surprising that this isn't currently cost effective and it's not obvious that it's the most cost effective area of research either.