160 Liters per day will not power many ICE powered vehicles.

that was real small. It was built to test the chemistry and physics involved. Then then tore it down and built a huge refinery.

More Blind Faith To Keep People Hooked On The Myth Of Progress.

Peak Meaninglessness

Last week’s discussion of externalities—costs of doing business that get dumped onto the economy, the community, or the environment, so that those doing the dumping can make a bigger profit—is, I’m glad to say, not the first time this issue has been raised recently. The long silence that closed around such things three decades ago is finally cracking; they’re being mentioned again, and not just by archdruids. One of my readers—tip of the archdruidical hat to Joe McInerney—noted an article in Grist a while back that pointed out the awkward fact that none of the twenty biggest industries in today’s world could break even, much less make a profit, if they had to pay for the damage they do to the environment.

Now of course the conventional wisdom these days interprets that statement to mean that it’s unfair to make those industries pay for the costs they impose on the rest of us—after all, they have a God-given right to profit at everyone else’s expense, right? That’s certainly the attitude of fracking firms in North Dakota, who recently proposed that they ought to be exempted from the state’s rules on dumping radioactive waste, because following the rules would cost them too much money. That the costs externalized by the fracking industry will sooner or later be paid by others, as radionuclides in fracking waste work their way up the food chain and start producing cancer clusters, is of course not something anyone in the industry or the media is interested in discussing.

Watch this sort of thing, and you can see the chasm opening up under the foundations of industrial society. Externalized costs don’t just go away; one way or another, they’re going to be paid, and costs that don’t appear on a company’s balance sheet still affect the economy. That’s the argument of The Limits to Growth, still the most accurate (and thus inevitably the most reviled) of the studies that tried unavailingly to turn industrial society away from its suicidal path: on a finite planet, once an inflection point is passed, the costs of economic growth rise faster than growth does, and sooner or later force the global economy to its knees.

The tricks of accounting that let corporations pretend that their externalized costs vanish into thin air don’t change that bleak prognosis. Quite the contrary, the pretense that externalities don’t matter just makes it harder for a society in crisis to recognize the actual source of its troubles. I’ve come to think that that’s the unmentioned context behind a dispute currently roiling those unhallowed regions where economists lurk in the shrubbery: the debate over secular stagnation.

Snip ...

they can own the world of fuel production. i would love to see more of the chemistry, math and energy input requirements.

sP

Let's hope it's not scalable, because the full headline should read "from energy, carbon dioxide and water." And the amount of energy that goes into the process is much less than the energy that one extracts burning the fuel. You're much better off charging a battery for most practical purposes.

The Navy is doing similar research not to be green, but so they can make liquid fuels while at sea. There may be niche applications where a liquid fuel has advantages outweighing the poor efficiency, but this is not a magic source of energy. And the involvement of an automaker just means they're trying to preserve our current transportation model, which only retards the development of a more sustainable system.

And who knows when a tech breakthrough will happen that increases the output from 160 litres to 1,600,000 litres with a low energy input to do it?

Multiply that by a few hundred/thousand factories and it will make a dent.

What's described doesn't sound unlike whats call the Fischer–Tropsch process which IIRC goes back to just after WWI.

What stopped the widespread use of the process is the cheap cost of oil. WWII made oil in short supply for Germany and so they used it. I believe that process was also used commercially in South Africa...

What sounds different is the energy and carbon source are renewables.

eom

that was the question in upstream threads when I posted.

It's pretty obvious that low oil-price stands in the way of profits and market penetration.

What is interesting, if one doesn't simply want to make obstreperous noise, is pretty much in the title and first paragraphs, that F-T process with renewables provides mechanisms can reach beyond "end-of-oil scenarios' using 'current-carbon' and alternative energy supply (and a few unnamed metals as catalysts).

eom

What about harnessing power of tides or geo-thermal?

Than a battery back up, Harvesting renewables all day and generating all night. with wind and solar backing each other up who knows what we could do.

That is why the need for a renewable electrical source, as it takes a lot of energy to break that bond, making the process very inefficient.
Excess electricity from nuclear power, aboard a military vessel would be ideal.
Nobody is going to be making their own diesel fuel or gasoline in their garage any time soon.