Another way to look at it: burning a gallon of gasoline emits about 20 pounds of CO2, or a hundredth of a ton. So at $100/ton, charging purchasers to clean up t

Another way to look at it: burning a gallon of gasoline emits about 20 pounds of CO2, or a hundredth of a ton. So at $100/ton, charging purchasers to clean up their emissions would cost a dollar a gallon. If we were to charge that, then many people would likely find it more efficient to switch to electric cars and so on. But for those applications where it's very expensive or infeasible to cut emissions (e.g. long-haul jets), having tech like this available makes net-zero feasible anyway. Besides, at this point we're going to need to actually reduce atmospheric CO2, and as you point out it's a hard problem, so we'd best start scaling the tech for it now.