Quote Originally Posted by Justin View Post
The US Navy has done similar experiments, with the hope of being able to generate aviation fuel from ocean water.

The biggest issue is that the process is hugely energy intensive, so you need to have the ability to generate a lot of power on demand. I would expect the process would work if you had excess power capacity, e.g. from a nuclear generator. In order for this to scale to any significant level using wind or solar you'd probably have to build a whole lot more wind and solar generating plants.

I would also expect that feeding in CO2 would likely present challenges as well; it's probably not at a high enough atmospheric concentration to make it economically viable to harvest it from the air. You'd probably be better off harvesting it straight out of the smokestacks of industrial facilities and then transporting it to your clean power generation location.

In short, it's a neat science experiment, but I don't see it being readily scaled to account for a measurable segment of the fuel consumed for transportation any time within the next 50 years.
Good to know that all the advancements we make in electricity production today will likely help us to make fuel once it truly does run out. We still need that stuff for LOTS of things that are critical to us in 2019 and I can only imagine will become even more critical moving forward.