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Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

I believe that by 2050 synthetic hydrocarbons made from carbon dioxide and clean electricity will be deliverable at a real (inflation adjusted) cost less than than 3x current oil prices, on an equivalent-energy-content basis. That could more than double the costs of a transatlantic flight, but still wouldn't price it out of reach of the upper middle class.

Synthetic methanol made with renewable energy has already been commercialized on a modest scale:

https://carbonrecycling.com/technology

Methanol can be reformed to kerosene as a drop-in replacement for oil derived jet fuel:

"Fischer-Tropsch & Methanol-based Kerosene"

https://aireg.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/airegWebinar_FT_...

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At 10-15% conversion efficiency, you're burning 85-90% of your energy just making the damn fuel, requiring 6-7× more renewable infrastructure than direct electrification. Current production costs are $15-25/gallon (not the fairy tale $2-3/gallon of jet fuel), and the physics won't magically improve to hit their "3× oil prices by 2050" fantasy. To replace global aviation fuel would demand a staggering 32,000 TWh of new clean energy generation – that's roughly equivalent to building 900 nuclear plants just to make luxury jet fuel while the rest of the grid still burns coal.

You've not actually addressed the cost points he makes. You seem to bediscounting the sheer cost effectiveness of renewable power because if an ideological opposition to it.

The wonderful thing about looking at how much something actually costs is you don't need to do all the work yourself - just look at the expense of the inputs and calculate your output. Solar panel electricity is absurdly cheap.

In any case it's obvious that current direct electrification is not feasible using current battery tech, so alternatives need to be explored. Unless we find a battery tech with 10x energy density batteries aren't likely to be viable in the air.

Just build more nuclear power plants. There’s absolutely no reason why modern civilization still needs to rely so heavily on hydrocarbons. Unlimited electric energy, with a electrified rail network, public transportation and EVs for commuting, should take care of most use cases, except maybe a few where the energy density doesn’t make sense.

And don’t even get me started with the “our grid cannot handle it” nonsense. If it cannot, then make it so that it can. When this country started off, we didn’t say “our roads cannot handle the cars”, instead we built them, quite a lot of them. We can do that again.

Sure, nuclear too. I'm fine with any low-emissions energy source. Electrification can take care of most terrestrial transportation. I still think we'll eventually use synthetic hydrocarbons for long range flights and a few other niche applications like rocket launches.

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