Is anyone familiar enough with the chemistry of creating synthetic hydrocarbons to comment on whatever bottleneck is preventing it from being mainstream?
It seems like synthetic gasoline and synthetic propane would be ideal energy sources (and that cheap hydrolysis would be the starting point), so I figure there must be a reason that people don't often talk about it.
It's not sexy and the cost is usually too high relative to fossil fuels.
I personally think it would make a lot of sense to develop further. Conventional fuels are very convenient, and if you produce them synthetically without extracting resources from underground deposits, there's a lot less climate impact. It wouldn't eliminate tailpipe emissions, but it might significantly reduce sulfur emissions for example.
Long distance transportation is always going to be a challenge for EVs, that synthetic fuels could handle if they're economical to produce and sell.
The processing plant that could be built with a certain investment would usually make more money processing crude or surplus petroleum than it would synthetic hydrocarbons.
The price of crude can be adjusted to maintain this situation.
Some biodiesel made from surplus edible oils can co-produce common gasoline-range hydrocarbons along with the biodiesel.
You have to figure those that are doing this are making money, they are just making less money from the same equipment than a traditional oil company would.
To some extent it's just a matter of what you want to invest in for the future compared to what has cumulatively been invested in over the past.
There should be opportunity for renewable gases, autofuels, and oils to share infrastructure with established petroleum and make money for shareholders as reliably as a traditional oil company. There simply needs to be ambition to accept a lower percent dividend per barrel in the same market, with the tradeoff/tradeup that the environmental impact per barrel is dramatically lesser by a much greater percentage.
So you make money as reliably as an oil company, only less of it but it's still possible for everybody to win.
Depends on what you are committed to.
OTOH whether it's photosynthetic, photocatalytic, photovoltaic or direct radiant solar, efficiency is not as much of a show-stopper as it would seem. Any net gain is free energy.
The first commercial synthetic gas plant opened in 1984 and is the Great Plains Synfuel plant in Beulah, North Dakota.[9] It is still operational and produces 1500 MW worth of SNG using coal as the carbon source. In the years since its opening, other commercial facilities have been opened using other carbon sources such as wood chips.
Glad to know it's more popular than I thought. Seems like a good thing to put near a windmill (or a fusion plant if we ever get there) so we can use existing infrastructure and switch from pumping billion-year-old carbon into to atmosphere to just pumping last-decade carbon into the atmosphere.
The wood chips thing is interesting. In the last five weeks I've filled as many trash totes with leaves from the neighbor's tree. I wonder how that mass of carbon compares with the gas I've burned for heat this winter.
We don't have an overabundance of low carbon energy that would justify the investments. There is also the problem that capturing CO2 is only economic at a point source. The fundamental problem is that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is too low for direct air carbon capture.
It seems like synthetic gasoline and synthetic propane would be ideal energy sources (and that cheap hydrolysis would be the starting point), so I figure there must be a reason that people don't often talk about it.