Obviously the tech isn't there yet, but when we find a (fast) way turn CO2 back into gasoline that will both allow all existing technologies to go green and also give us a good recapture path (pump it back down into the wells).
If we want to do the reverse operation, we don't have the luxury of just spending the wasted part though, we have to spend all of this energy.
It is also important to be careful about framing the intent. Carbon capture does not make continued emissions okay, but might conceivably help to minimize emissions that occur during transition.
No! It is not possible. It will always be more efficient to use the solar power directly to reduce CO2 emitters (like coal plants), because that skips the losses the CO2-emitting and CO2-capturing mechanisms will have.
Due to the enormity of the physical work involved, we don't expect to have solar/wind/nuclear/hydrogen/whatever at 100% of the energy grid for many years to come.
In the meantime, cracking open limestone to make it absorb carbon is a good idea.*
We cannot redeploy literally everyone into making solar panels and building nuclear plants, therefore there is a relative gain to be made by switching at least some people from $UNRELATED_JOB_X to carbon capture.
* Worth mentioning: carbon capture doesn't require enormous amounts of electricity or really any significant amount of energy at all AFAIK - crack rocks, when rocks full, put somewhere.
Limestone needs 2.3
Basalt 6
nothing on seaweed, unfortch
(source: https://www.economist.com/special-report/2023/11/20/carbon-d..., stick archive.is in front if you need to, I feel bad doing that directly as a customer)
My local utility sent me a message last year: they generated more power from wind than all customers total used. All it took was building windfarms all across Iowa, and they are still building more (I assume to sell to Chicago or Minneapolis, but I don't know how the grid is connected)
Sure there are times when the wind isn't blowing. However there is a lot of time when it is blowing, and most of the world isn't even 100% wind during those time. Get busy building instead of being defeatists or pointing out the times wind doesn't blow - those times are why you keep the old power plants operational. (though battery storage should be investigated)
Just getting todays low hanging fruit: Wind powered grid, and replacing cars with EVs would make a massive difference. Then we can start talking about other uses of energy, but between electric and cars we have covered most energy uses and those are ready to be fixed today, with today's technology.
That's really aggressive.
> It will always be more efficient to use the solar power directly to reduce CO2 emitters (like coal plants)
Until you run out of coal plants. Then it stops being "always".
There are uses where it's very hard to switch to batteries, to the extent that it's easier to make biofuel or synthetic fuel.
Then you continue with, as i called them, other "CO2 emitters". Like cars or concrete production.
But airplanes are an example where producing fuel seems like a pretty good option.
Whether it actually will is still a question of hope. Pretty damned far-fetched hope in terms of net-negative CO2 production from my admittedly limited understanding, especially if we cannot find a way to agree collectively to reduce carbon emissions.
The problem is cost - oil from the ground is a lot cheaper than trying to manufacture it from other sources, and while there is some room for improvement smart engineers have been working on the problem for decades. If they haven't found a solution yet it seems unlikely it can be solved.
The difficult part is to convince people not to use the charcoal as fuel.
Problem is that even if you could do carbon capture for zero energy cost and convert it back to gasoline at 100% efficiency (hint: neither of these things are remotely likely), you still will use more energy to power your ship/plane/miner/truck than an electric version of the same.
It therefore only makes sense for use cases where the energy cost is negligible.
The more salient point than fast is cheap, preferably something with a net profit, which seems... unlikely.