They're focusing on transportation fuel (cars and airplanes), but another area of great potential is power generation. The current trend is to build solar/wind and replace coal with natural gas plants as a stop-gap until some grid-scale energy storage is ready. Everyone assumes that energy storage will be batteries.
But what if the natural gas plants don't have to be a stop gap? Just keep building more and more solar/wind, as much as the land can handle (imagine most of the desert in California converted to solar). Who cares if generation greatly exceeds daily demand. Use all the excess solar/wind to create fuel for the natural gas plants. There's already a vast infrastructure and experienced workforce to do this. Use the fuel during the evening and put any excess fuel into storage, there's so much existing ways to store fuel. Then use that during winter when solar generation decreases.
We need to stop thinking carbon fuel = fossil fuel and so carbon fuel = bad. Carbon fuel is simply a form of energy storage, a kind of "battery".
But what if the natural gas plants don't have to be a stop gap? Just keep building more and more solar/wind, as much as the land can handle (imagine most of the desert in California converted to solar). Who cares if generation greatly exceeds daily demand. Use all the excess solar/wind to create fuel for the natural gas plants. There's already a vast infrastructure and experienced workforce to do this. Use the fuel during the evening and put any excess fuel into storage, there's so much existing ways to store fuel. Then use that during winter when solar generation decreases.
We need to stop thinking carbon fuel = fossil fuel and so carbon fuel = bad. Carbon fuel is simply a form of energy storage, a kind of "battery".