Carbon dioxide needs to be captured were there is a lot of carbon dioxide in the air. So especially around cities with lots of car traffic, or around fossil fuel power plants...

So... It would be better to stop car traffic and fossil fuel power plants first, before doing carbon capture. And the purpose of that should be, making the air cleaner. And putting that carbon back into a less environmental damaging state.

I didn't know the machine needed no maintenance and that its own life cycle was carbon neutral. TIL/s

Sure, for a homeowner it doesn't make sense. But what about at grid scale when there isn't enough demand for that electricity?

What opportunity cost is there to NOT do it when the power would otherwise be wasted or generation capacity reduced? If anything, I'd say the opportunity cost is of not doing this with over generation on the grid/plant

First Magic: The Gathering, and now this. Have Republicans no shame?

Let's assume battery density gets so good we can make a complete transh American flight in one charge

Nice thought experiment, but the physics of how batteries work mean we can't. The theory behind batteries only allow for so much improvement, and will never get close to gasoline/diesel. For most driving batteries are good enough, but they will never be as good as gasoline despite how inefficient ICEs are.

Except it won’t be.

None of the things you've described increase the carbon output.

What chemical reaction gets more carbon out than it puts in?
(Where do these new carbon atoms come from, fusion?)

If anything, those other products include non-gaseous compounds which sequester the carbon from the fuel into a solid resulting in a net-negative amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere.

Those side-products are not good, I'm not saying otherwise, but they are not additional carbon.

The particulate matter won’t occur in a hydrocarbon that is generated, that comes from imperfect processing of crude. If you pull the carbon directly out of the air there are no particulates.

But yes it will still be carbon neutral. No additional carbon will be released back into the atmosphere.

No they do exist! But most scientists agree that we are unlikely to ever see commercial airliners using it, nor will freight liners use it. We would have to see ENORMOUS scientific improvements and many many many things that seem incredibly far fetched invented to get to that point.

Until we get rid of the necessity for gasoline, this is better than extracting new fossil fuels and might be better than biofuels produced far away.

Also, I don't think any form of carbon capture from atmosphere is realistic at scale to reduce CO2. You need atv least as much energy as we are burning just to keep up, and that's assuming 100% efficiency which is impossible. Focusing on reducing new CO2 emitted seems more effective

The efficiency doesn’t matter (to a point of manufacturing solar cells, or wind turbines, or whatever your equipment is for your renewable energy source). If all of the gasoline is generated from the air using renewable energy, it could take 100x the energy and still be completely carbon neutral. Carbon neutrality is based on the amount of excess carbon added to the air. If no carbon is added then by definition it’s carbon neutral.

Porsche already has a factory in Chile that is doing this exact same thing at a much larger scale.

Well, I don't know if the reason given is that significant, they'd just plan around the fixed weight. The issue being the energy per unit volume/weight being so far behind hydrocarbons that some applications do demand it.

So while stationary/grid applications may lean battery since size/weight hardly matters, and EVs are debatable good enough for many scenarios, I will grant that for aircraft, boats, and some heavy equipment it's hard to beat hydrocarbons.

Unfortunately, on that front it has to compete with extracted hydrocarbons and doesn't seem like it can compete as yet. It however may give hope for a more resource constrained future that the battery-hostile scenarios may still be fulfilled in a sustainable way, just at higher relative expense than today. Or they iterate on their processes to have cheaper equipment and/or increased efficiency to come closer to competitive with extracted hydrocarbons. Or a viable thing to reference for some governments mandating sustainably sourced hydrocarbons when they are really needed.

At least taking their figures at face value, about 75kwh to generate a gallon of gas, and let's say 67 kwh to get a an EV 200 miles (assuming some losses between the generation and the actual battery capacity, and 3 miles/kwh which is on the low-ish end of EVs, but realistically close). The most aggressive hybrids getting 50 mpg so we end up with it being about 4x worse than charging an EV with that energy source.

At least at residential rates where I live, that's about $10, so it would only really make sense when gas gets to $10/gallon, otherwise, go to the pump for the fossil fuel. That's ignoring the cost of the station itself.

So maybe nearer than one might imagine, but still highly impractical. Maybe if they doubled the efficiency and gas eeks up without residential electricity rates going up...

But all this is assuming it will work exactly as well as they say it is, and I've learned to have a healthy dose of skepticism... Here though I can be as optimistic as they like and it's still a tough sell..