[d_burfoot]

The analogy to vertical farming is a tempting one, but ultimately misleading. There is a crucial difference between TI-produced natural gas and Saudi-produced gas: the former is carbon neutral, the latter isn't.

For every molecule of CH4 TI creates, they're pulling a molecule of C02 out of the atmosphere to do it. When you burn a CH4 molecule from a Saudi well, you're moving carbon from the ground into the atmosphere.

[churchill]

Will you pay 10x for synthetic fuel? And if you do, for moral reasons, you will be driven out of the market by those burning cheaper fuel. Just like the cultured meat startups have learned, established players won't let you take away their subsidies and drive them out of business.

Big Oil has rivers of money to lobby and make sure carbon-neutral fuel startups can't legislate them out of the market.

[nine_k]

The fuel need not be 10x as expensive if you mine at the natural sources of hot CO₂. Which are steel-making furnaces, cement-making furnaces, and, well, carbon-burning power plants. All these industries can provide you with plenty of CO₂, reliably, at a zero or negative cost.

This makes the synthesis much more efficient, because you need far less energy and space to capture the CO₂.

Even if all power plants could turn carbon-free, steelmaking and production of cement cannot, they involve CO₂ as a key chemical step. Until 100% of steel is recycled, and concrete is replaced entirely by something else, you will still have stable, rich sources to run your synthesis off of.

[churchill]

Scales poorly, and these C02 feeders can ruin your business overnight by imposing or jerking up fees once your operation is even remotely viable. What are you going to do? Teleport your facility?

The location advantage then becomes your greatest disadvantage.

it's just like installing solar in parts of the Sahara. Land is cheap and sunshine is abundant. Until an Al-Qaeda affiliate seizes one of your solar farms or the local government is overthrown and the coupists are trying to extort you. Now, how much will you spend hiring mercenaries to retake and occupy a foreign country, even if you discount international backlash?

[nine_k]

Scales poorly — any oil well has a particular debit, naturally limited. So will this.

The conflict of interest is real. This is why I expect the same companies that produce the CO₂ to process it into fuel. Say, steelmakers need a lot of pure oxygen, this is why they sell the liquid nitrogen they produce along the way. Similarly they extract and sell a number of metals that occur in the input ores in low concentrations and are not worth mining by themselves.

Regarding Sahara, the things are sadly as you described. But large industries are usually in politically more stable areas.

[megaman821]

There is probably a market for 2-4x more expensive carbon-neutral aviation fuel. Most other fuel-consuming vehicles are better off going in a different direction, batteries or hydrogen fuel cells.

[churchill]

Probably. but, aviation margins are currently around 2.7%, while fuel constitutes 20% of their operating cost. Even if an airline switches a few of its aircrafts to 4x costlier carbon-neutral fuel, it's just so they can brag about it in their annual climate responsibility reports.

It is going to be hard to adopt 2-4x more expensive fuel across your fleet, just because.

[seltzered_]

> "Big Oil has rivers of money to lobby and make sure carbon-neutral fuel startups can't legislate them out of the market."

I'm not trying to take an endorsing position on e-fuels, but wanted to note Prometheus talked in one of their interviews and argued they would work around tensions with 'big oil' not via legislation but having direct customer relationships with competitive price commitments:

From interview of Rob McGinnis ( https://curiositypodcast.substack.com/p/future-of-sustainabl... ) of Prometheus Fuels:

"We have not gone to raise money from anybody in oil and gas. We've always said we wanted to go to our customers and form relations with them. So that's why a car company and a shipping company, for example. And we did LOIs with airlines. The ones that got published was with American Airlines. We said we'd give them 10 million gallons of jet fuel for one cent less than the spot price of Jet A."

[schiffern]

It makes no difference. Saudi Arabia won't stop pumping gas because it's not carbon neutral.

edit Depleting their entire reserves of gas would be stopping because it's unsustainable, not because it's not carbon neutral. Also that sounds like a really bad idea.

[sn9]

Running out of gas in the ground will do that though.

[XorNot]

We will not run out for hundreds to thousands of years.

We also can't afford to stop using it by "running out" since that implies we burned it all.

[sl-1]

Sadly there seems to be reserves[1] for quite a long time. The real question is how much of the reserves are profitable to exploit.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_g...