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Comment by quelsolaar | Hacker News Reader

Lately i've been thinking that right now may be a great time to start an oil company. Cost of solar is going down so capturing c02 and turning it into fuel is looking like a viable option. People would pay a premiun for carbon neutral fuel. Most climate companies, focused on carbon capture, tried to make the most efficient carbon capture possible, but what if one focused on scalability and reducing manufacturing costs instead? A device that loses 90%+ of the energy when converting sun to fuel, would be viable if the cost of the machine would just be low enough, and scaled up enough. Such a device would in theory have a near 0 cost of operation once installed, so with a long enough life span it would be profitable.

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Electro-fuels currently cost about $15 per gallon - In case anyone else was curious.

https://theicct.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/fuels-us-euro...

Thanks for the link! $15 is a reasonable price where a company hyper focused on lowering the cost of manufacturing of C02 extraction machines, could become very competative withing a reasonable timeframe.

It kind of floored me when I first heard it. Tripling the cost of jet fuel would be bad, but not that bad. And that number is likely to fall.

This is the play that Terraform Industries is engaging in as well. Cost for synthesizing a unit of methane from atmospheric CO2 and water using solar power is set to drop lower than the cost of drilling it out of the ground.

https://terraformindustries.com/

According to their December newsletter, they project that point will occur in 2027 without subsidies and 2024 with the subsidies provided by the Inflation Reduction Act.

> lower than the cost of drilling it out of the ground.

Shipping is a huge component of the price of natural gas. So it'll be a long time before they're cheaper than the price of natural gas in Alberta or Siberia, but they'll be able to beat the price in Los Angeles a lot sooner.

That’s a good point, local production cuts out the cost of transportation

https://www.twelve.co is doing this (with fuels as well as other carbon-derived chemicals). Trouble is, this is carbon recycling, not carbon sequestering. It's better than the status quo, but I'm more excited about ideas that either sequester GHGs permanently or replace industrial GHG-generating processes permanently.

The first step is to reduce emissions, then stop them all together and finally sequester them to return to pre-climate-change level. I'd welcome all solutions along that spectrum.

There's no fundamental difference between burning a synthetic fuel or burning a fossel fuel and sequestering the resulting carbon. Both are zero-carbon.

Yes, sequestration can go negative-carbon, but that doesn't help anybody who has a difficult to replace fuel burning process.

Storing liquids (or solids) from at STP is far simpler than storing it in gaseous form. If we can cheaply extract CO2 or methane from the atmosphere and make liquid from it, we could sequester it in all sorts of trivial ways.

Sure, but that's not what Twelve is doing or what the "I should start an oil company" comment suggested. They're talking about extracting CO2 to make fuel, and then burning it again in the same petroleum-based economy.

Yeah sure. And that ties into all our existing infrastructure, which seems fair.

If we can extract and burn and extract and burn and keep going with that loop (without dinosaur input), then all that extract-burn cycle is zero-carbon.

We can then separately decide to pump some of that cycle’s output into easy liquid storage, thus going carbon-negative.

I think you're on to something, it makes me curious what the energy expenditure of one of these operations is in a conventional deployment, then what it would be over time with solar being the producer of energy.

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