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by cphajduk 1953 days ago
Starship runs on Oxygen and Methane, both are renewable, both can easily be extracted from the air. Carbon neutral.
1 comments

100% carbon neutral once fusion power makes the electricity needed to do air-to-fuel conversion basically free.
Any renewable or nuclear energy source would make it carbon neutral. It doesn't have to be free, the fuel doesn't cost that much in the first place, so a modest percentage cost increase is fine.

We know that making the methane isn't super-expensive, because we've already used the Sabatier process commercially to make methane from CO2. That used carbon-based fuels to get the CO2; to really go carbon-neutral it'd have to be biofuel, or we'd need to pull CO2 from the air using direct-air-capture machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction#Creation_of_...

Apparently they already do this or have plans to do this with solar power:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1258308230725292032