Key take from the article: > At the very small scales used here, the process was pretty slow. Over the course of a day, with seven hours of useful sunlight, th

Key take from the article: > At the very small scales used here, the process was pretty slow. Over the course of a day, with seven hours of useful sunlight, the setup produced 32 milliliters of methanol, which was mixed in with water as a major contaminant. And also: > Then there's a matter of scale. To fuel a daily round-trip flight between New York City and London, the researchers estimate, it would take 10 mirror farms directing sunlight at reaction chambers in an area that gets strong and consistent sunlight. That translates to covering around 3.8 square kilometers of the desert with mirrors. (For context, that's about a quarter of the size of California's Ivanpah solar facility.) The article also mentions possible nickel-and-dime optimizations, but even though the experiment proved thag it is possible and allowed for a nice headline it doesn't seem to have any possibility to scale at all.