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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

> electricity+CO2+water => fuel

Considering fuel => electricity+CO2+water is financially viable today, the reverse can never be financially viable unless the prices of the inputs and outputs shift quite a bit...

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There are times and places where electricity has a negative price, and potentially a carbon pricing scheme could subsidise taking it out of the air. But a big factor in this is the cost of the plant; nobody's going to spend £100m on a plant that runs 5% of the year. Hence the desire to simplify the process.

The US navy also has a use for this: at-sea refuelling of planes and other ships from the spare power from the nuclear aircraft carrier.

It still depends on how expensive it is to get the fuel. It could be essentially free to go fuel => electricity + CO2 + water but that's no good if getting fuel is expensive.

Unless you include the price of obtaining fuel in that transformation arrow, but then the observation boils down to if extracting fuel is cheaper than synthesizing it then synthesizing it isn't financially viable.

This view ignores that energy can have a different cost in different locations, and that fuel is convenient due to its portable nature. Converting energy into fuel may be economically viable at a solar plant in the middle of a desert even if it wouldn't be so in the middle of a city.

The actual problem is that the downsides of turning (fossil) fuel into anything else are not priced in. If the damages done by emitting carbon, particular matter, nitrous gases, sulphur, ... had to be paid for by the producer, then fossil fuels would have a very bleak outlook.

Hmm is the argument that you can generate infinite money otherwise? I think the two directions only look superficially the same because externalities and labor isn't taken into account?

Of course it can, it all depends on the actual proportions in each reaction.

Most notably of the share of CO2 in each, which aims to be drastically different.

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