A lot of conspiracy theories are paranoid, but the propaganda machine of the oil industry is very real and managed to incite a lot of economically counter-productive policies.
My point was, you can view the alcohols as a feedstock for the gasoline production, and given that, you might just stream in large quantities of already-produced and cheap grain ethanol etc. from Indiana.
In other words, the flow of material would look like:
CO2 -> polymers, drugs, and other useful solid materials
There would be no [product] -> CO2 step at the end. It cuts out the re-release of CO2 and eliminates a dependence on petroleum.
In other words, for the next handful of decades, the worldwide fleet of cars, trucks, generators, boats, etc. are going to be burning carbon that comes from somewhere. Products like this provide a carbon-neutral means of supplying that demand.
It's like working on a huge existing codebase, but at much larger scale, and with geopolitics. People are working on rebuilding it all from scratch, but iterating within the existing infrastructure could also deliver huge wins.
And, if we somehow found ourselves in a world in which carbon-neutral petrochemicals were the norm, well, we can always generate a surplus and sequester that surplus, right?