RedNEO wrote: ↑22 Dec 2020, 10:39
I can give credit to battery tech for pushing the industry towards a better solution.
Now that F1 is also investigating synthetic fuels, in which hydrogen and carbon can be captured directly from the air that will be the natural evolution by 2030 which will lead to net zero carbon emissions. It’s a pretty exciting thought that fuel will be made from extracting carbon directly from the atmosphere.
But even if F1 were to go that way (which, as Just_a_fan says, is not particularly promising in terms of energy economy), what's the point if there is little to no application in road cars? And even if we account for the fact that it will take decades before second-hand ICE cars &c are gone, and that those cars may, during that period, be using biofuels - how is that relevant for the development of
better ICEs? Because that's in the end what determines whether manufacturers would want to invest in ICE development - will new ICE cars be sold in sufficient numbers? With tech development going as it is, my answer to that would be a resounding no.
That's no reason not to use biofuels. If F1 uses ICEs, they should use carbon neutral fuels for their legitimacy. But there's no reason to 'lead the pack' and pour humongous amounts of money into development of ICEs that are marginally better attuned to the biofuel composition, and have no subsequent market application. Just buy the fuel and race with it.
Now, about Direct Air Capture of CO2... you need to get about 400PPM of CO2 out of air. The energy consumption of that is insane. As Just_a_Fan indicates, you will never get a positive return on energy with that. Also, if Toto criticizes electric vehicles for using 'dirty energy'... DAC will require much more energy. So the problem is even bigger, there. If you are generating clean energy anyway, you are better off storing it in battery packs than using it for DAC-Synfuels. Or split water and make hydrogen, if you want higher energy density. Or use carbon captured from industrial processes if you want to make methanol, and use a fuel cell rather than ICE in your power train.
I'm not against DAC itself, by the way. But we have to realize it comes at a cost, and it's not efficient to make fuels out of it. Maybe the carbon will be used to make materials, or just be stored underground to take it out of the atmospheric cycle. Most developing companies anticipate a price of some $100/tonCO2 in due time; add $50 or so for further storage processing and we're at $150/ton. That's still a lot better than the social cost of carbon, which is estimated some $400/ton (Ricke et al. 2018) on economic considerations (and will increase if we add costs of lost quality of life, forced immigration, etc.). So in that respect, we'd be better of pulling carbon from the air (which is required at some point if we want to stay <2 degC global warming), than leaving the carbon in the air and repairing the damages. But there's a lot of low hanging fruit to grab before we go there - DAC only makes sense with energy excess.