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Comment by doitLP | Hacker News Reader

Aren’t all of these net zero or worse when accounting for construction and lifespan?

Or is the fact of using renewables to power going to hopefully net positive over a long enough time scale?

There are a lot of situations where direct electrical storage is unfeasible and chemical fuels will still be necessary. From a carbon perspective this switches us from unearthing old carbon out of the ground towards recycling it.

Governments could also pay to have carbon pumped out of the air and buried back into the ground as reconstituted liquid fuel.

There will likely always be a need for hydrocarbon fuels until there are order of magnitude improvements in battery energy density, or we decide small nuclear reactors are acceptable for things like cargo ships and aviation.

Plus, having much better carbon capture tech means just simply removing CO2 for some sort of inert long term storage is cheaper.

My father pointed out to me that it's a form of battery. In the end we are still consuming energy to make the battery and will burn that fuel at a later time. You could take excess power created by solar or wind and create fuel and store it to burn later when demand goes beyond what the panels can produce during the night.

The fuel is also transportable...

Tankable fuel is generally more versatile than fixed battery installations. You can sell excess, once your tankage is full.

It's a lot less net than regular gasoline.

Using renewables must be the plan, to make this sort of thing environmentally beneficial.

They could even run it when electrical demand is low (sucking up extra watts and essentially subsidizing renewable over-building) and then maybe even use their output to fuel a power station, to help shave demand peaks. So, acting like an energy storage device. Of course there are plenty of other ideas in the energy storage device space, and probably most of them are more efficient, but they don't produce legacy car fuel.

In theory you could take some percentage of hydrocarbon production and store it to reach zero.

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