[XorNot]

Solar made hydrocarbons are never going to be economical.

Confident predictions of the inevitability of renewable diesel at $3 a liter don't add up because diesel is $3 a liter right now. I am literally paying that at the pump. I will actually happily pay more then that if the diesel were actually renewable, but instead it doesn't exist.

[marcosdumay]

Of course they are. We aren't going to be able to take hydrocarbons out of the ground forever.

You won't burn them in your truck, though. That's an almost certainty. But whatever use they still get when we end transitioning to solar will be met by synthetic hydrocarbons, there's no point on keeping the entire oil production and distribution industries when you can just make a bit of it near the point of use.

[pfdietz]

I expect in a post-fossil age we'll get organic chemical feedstocks from biomass, and non-biomass solar will help with that by providing hydrogen for hydrodeoxygenation. That will roughly double the hydrocarbons one can get from a given quantity of carbohydrate. Biomass here will also include waste stream organic matter.

[JuniperMesos]

Airplane fuel seems like a use case that's likely to be economical even if most of the rest of the economy is no longer using fossil fuels as a source of power. Batteries are heavy and that matters a lot in an airplane. Not to mention all the petrochemical uses of oil.

> Fossil fuels in the last century reached their extreme prices because of their inherent utility: they pack a great deal of potential energy into an extremely efficient package. If we can but sidestep the 100 million year production process, we can corner this market once again.

> —CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Strategy Session

[triceratops]

> Solar made hydrocarbons are never going to be economical.

"Predictions are hard, especially about the future".