It’s not worse. It’s carbon neutral (as long as the energy source is renewable like the sun). Any carbon it takes in will be released exactly back to where it was. It’s a much much better option than digging up oil.
On top of that, there are currently no likely possibilities of replacing gasoline for things like planes. So replacing their gas with carbon neutral gas will improve the situation by 100%.
Well, it shouldn’t be carbon neutral… It should used to get carbon out of the atmosphere and into a less damaging substance.
Carbon capture does not replace getting rid of our dependency on burning fossil fuels.
We wouldn’t get back the same amount that we are burning anyway. So this approach is worse, because dumb people think it would save us, without us changing the way we produce energy.
It is worse, because it is a distraction from actually doing something.
Until we get rid of the necessity for gasoline, this is better than extracting new fossil fuels and might be better than biofuels produced far away.
Also, I don’t think any form of carbon capture from atmosphere is realistic at scale to reduce CO2. You need atv least as much energy as we are burning just to keep up, and that’s assuming 100% efficiency which is impossible. Focusing on reducing new CO2 emitted seems more effective
It takes twice as much electrical energy to produce energy in the form of gasoline.
We lose money on every sale, but make it up on volume!
What’s the alternative? Turning down production when demand is lower than supply or try to out it into batteries.
So you can either do nothing, or use the capacity you’d otherwise waste. Then it comes down to which is a better / cheaper storage method: building batteries, or something that turns that extra power I to some that can be easily stored/used later.
Finally a way to turn clean solar into something I can burn.
insert Adam Something’s “shitting in the living room” metaphor here
This would actually provide me enough gas each week with my hybrid in office schedule.
I imagine this as a system that uses spare renewable energy like solar to generate gas that can be used to smooth the curve that is a renewable power source. It’s real value is that it reduces infrastructure needs, allowing its use in remote environments. But it does add a lot of additional failure points.
All the catches
