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Comment by drBonkers | Hacker News Reader

If you create hydrocarbon fuels with sequestered CO_2, driven by nuclear electricity, you have a clean, energy-dense battery. Plus, you don’t have to retrofit the entire automobile fleet.

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Just make sure to do something about NOx emissions, the cause of the downfall of Diesel in many countries. As long as you burn just about any fuel - hydrocarbon or otherwise - using air you'll end up with NOx as a combustion by-product. Filtering out nitrogen from air is possible - zeolites are used for this purpose in oxygen concentrators - but hard to do at a high enough capacity to satisfy the needs of even modest-sized ICEs so a post-combustion NOx capture/conversion step will be needed regardless of the provenance of the fuel [1].

[1] http://www.meca.org/technology/technology-details?id=5&name=...

Sort of - but it doesn't solve the issue with air quality. Electrification of transport isn't just about CO2. We'll see more instant benefits from having air we can breathe.

Air quality is a problem that basically all of the first world has solved to varying extents that depend mostly on whether the local areas are affected are rich enough that it tops their lists of problems.

When the developing world gets rich they'll care too.

Is that why the richest people in london enjoy illegally toxic air?

https://www.clientearth.org/latest/press-office/press/top-co...

Every megacity is mega polluted, you cant have clean air with cars

Since you couldn't realistically replace all ICE vehicles right away, it'd help ease the transition and especially in rural areas, air quality might not be a big concern anyway. If you end up with a surplus of clean gas, you could just burn it in dedicated plants and take care of the NOx there, or use it for aviation and in agriculture.

A lot of the air pollution from cars is from brake dust and tire micro particles. EVs do result in less brake dust, but the tires are still a problem.

And if you live on the West coast, it was recently discovered that an essential chemical used for tire durability and safety causes mass deaths in salmon. (Or rather, the chemical breaks down into another chemical, which causes mass salmon death, and probably other fish death too).

I will appreciate never having to hear a damn diesel truck again, however. Those things should be taxed heavily for noise pollution in addition tk their massive particulate emissions.

They call them e-fuels.. but the overall efficiency is low. There is a recent Engineering Explained video about this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d0MPg7DxbY

But liquid fuels are incredibly convenient, so maybe they will be worth the high price in certain applications. For example in jet engines for airplanes.

>Plus, you don’t have to retrofit the entire automobile fleet.

The entire transportation fleet, a good chunk of the grid and a good chunk of the infrastructure for heating things.

How long does it take for CO2 sequestered in the ground to form hydrocarbon chains?

Thousands? Probably millions of years. Far longer than human civilization/species will last or need to worry about.

But big auto bought into EVs and climate change once they realized it was a way to make everyone have to buy new cars. So your idea is a non-starter.

Except most manufacturers are losing money on every EV they sell.

I don't think it's about making everyone buy new cars as much as about realizing that there's a new category of ultra-palatable government subsidies for them to cash in on.

People already cycle through cars quite frequently. Big Auto doesn't need to convince anybody to buy a new car. This would be a purposeless conspiracy.

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