It still depends on how expensive it is to get the fuel. It could be essentially free to go fuel => electricity + CO2 + water but that's no good if getting fuel

It still depends on how expensive it is to get the fuel. It could be essentially free to go fuel => electricity + CO2 + water but that's no good if getting fuel is expensive. Unless you include the price of obtaining fuel in that transformation arrow, but then the observation boils down to if extracting fuel is cheaper than synthesizing it then synthesizing it isn't financially viable.