Converting CO2 into fuell isn't the hard part. The hard part is getting the CO2 out of the atmosphere in the first place.
We've known how to convert CO2 into fuel since the end of the 19th century.
We've known how to convert CO2 into fuel since the end of the 19th century.
From the article: The Martian atmosphere is composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide.
For Mars, the process being inefficient, expensive, slow etc. isn't necessarily a big hurdle as it competes with shipping fuel all the way from Earth, while on Earth, it has to compete with a lot of easily available alternatives.
It can run 24/7.
Little running costs?
No one complaining about NIMBYISM.
Though in the long term, it might be useful to do what you propose to produce carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuel for things that need exceptional energy density. Like air travel or space launch vehicles.
Yes that's what I had in mind - thanks.
I do remain sceptical that electric cars will save us. If everyone buys an electric car, and then plugs them in the evening to charge - I'm not sure the grid will cope very well. IMHO there is still a valid case for running cars, trucks and trains on hydrocarbons.
If you have a short commute, you might also not care how fully charged your car is as long as it is enough. So you may specify that you want a state of charge of 50-80% at the end of the day, and the grid can decide when to charge your car. It won't be enough to smooth out all the fluctuations in renewable generation, but it surely will help.
10 million cars (~20% of the cars existing in Germany) attempting to charge is at least 10 GW of load that can be shed when necessary, and significantly more than that in load that you can sink when there is excess power (I'm assuming each car needs to charge e.g. 10 kWh over 10 hours). Wikipedia says the total Regelleistung (operating reserve?) in Germany is 12.5 GW (7 GW in one direction, 5.5 in the other) and that this is responsible for 40% of the cost of the grid fees.
But another problem is that road construction itself is a huge cause of greenhouse gas emissions and isn't solved at all by electric cars. Only fewer and lighter cars would make things better. Personally I think electric scooters could replace a fair bit of car travel. The little sit down ones are sufficient to get you around for most trips and carry a bags worth of stuff.
Nuclear power is currently more expensive per kWh than renewables. This could potentially change if we were to build many identical plants, which would be viable with this strategy. By building it somewhere far from civilization, lower safety standards could also become acceptable, lowering cost further.
But in order for this to pay off, you'd need an absolutely massive investment, and I suspect nobody wants to take that risk. Building 100 nuclear power plants will be cheaper than building one per plant but still more expensive in absolute numbers, and each plant is already a many-billion project. So for this to work, you'd likely need someone to commit hundreds of billions, and most likely all upfront/at the same time to actually reap the cost benefits for the nuclear plants. And the technology to actually make use of the power isn't there yet.
OTOH, with solar and wind, you can build a plant at basically any scale. A lot of small projects is much easier to make happen than one absolutely gargantuan one.