MIT engineers make converting CO2 into useful products more practical

Electrochemical cells (especially PEM electrolyzers) are notorious for containing materials far more expensive than copper (noble metals). But they pay for themselves much more quickly than you might think, if you can get offtakers to actually purchase and use the resulting products.

The biggest challenge facing these climate tech industries right now is the chicken-and-egg problem. You can't make anything cheaper than the centuries-old fossil-based competition unless you do it at scale; you can't scale it without offtakers; offtakers won't participate unless it is cheaper than the status quo.

There are compounding issues with expensive infrastructure upgrades (e.g. airplane or maritime engines that need to be upgraded to handle new fuels; pipelines or fuel trucks that need to be build to handle hydrogen, etc) that further push out the break even date. And then you have oil & gas companies inserting themselves into these efforts in order to greenwash their businesses, causing many would-be supporters to oppose entire clean technologies due to the perception that green tech startups are in bed with the fossil industry.

> The biggest challenge facing these climate tech industries right now is the chicken-and-egg problem. You can't make anything cheaper than the centuries-old fossil-based competition unless you do it at scale; you can't scale it without offtakers; offtakers won't participate unless it is cheaper than the status quo.

That's the exact sort of thing governments are supposed to solve.

It's also a marketing problem. As long as the product is a commodity, it's a margins game. As soon as you can differentiate it somehow there's room to be more expensive and still sell the product.

Just as an example that might be incredibly terrible for other reasons, I can imagine Ikea selling, say, furniture with plastics made from this particular ethylene source. They might explicitly mark it up somehow saying "this chair directly offsets a week's worth of car driving", or whatever, and done right, with the right choice architecture, people might be willing to pay considerably more for it than stock.

I am, as you can probably tell, no marketer. But part of the answer has to be to get it out of the commodity bucket.