$3,000 “carbon neutral” coach class tickets from LA -> NYC?
I’m being a little ridiculous but I legitimately don’t get it.
Tech like this only works under some carbon credit scheme that provides no value and just transfers wealth to the inventors of these Rube Goldberg machines and their already wealthy investors.
The qualifier about needing to be economic is really important here. We will never really run out of oil, but we might run out of cheap oil.
As market prices for oil rise, more and more alternative ways to get at it become economical. Shale oil was one example of this process. (Another one is to create something like oil from coal. The Germans did a lot of this kind of thing in WW2, because they had access to plenty of coal, but were short on oil. Similarly, world coal reserves seem to be much larger than oil reserves.)
However, renewables are getting better and better and thus prevent energy prices from rising as fast as the cost of oil extraction will increase.
Thus eventually making oil uncompetitive, as you say.
This seems like a good capability in and of itself. Not sure what the economics look like, but there could be a market if this enables other trade offs in the production or avgas—maybe producing some nominal amount with much lower electrical grid requirements?
But generally, you have kerosene and gasoline based fuels gmost popular of them are JET-A1 (kerosene with additives) and AVGAS100LL (gasoline based, low lead). There are others, including jet fuels that are heavily cut with paraffin (or infamously with lighter fluid) iirc and AVGAS variants that don't contain any lead.
Fully synthetic fuels have been used in the past, mostly for high efficiency (USSR had an R-7 aka Soyuz variant for extra hard orbits that used syntin in place of RP-1 aka kerosene) though lost people remember "coal to fuel" attempts of axis forces in WW2