I'm personally a huge fan of carbon capture -> synthetic hydrocarbons + fossil fuel plants, in theory. Maybe a mix of storage systems will ultimately be the be

I'm personally a huge fan of carbon capture -> synthetic hydrocarbons + fossil fuel plants, in theory. Maybe a mix of storage systems will ultimately be the best solution for whatever reasons, but this idea makes so much sense to me because of how it takes advantage of all of our existing infrastructure. Just stand up renewables at existing plants, use spare capacity to power capturing CO2 from the output and/or the air, formulate the captured CO2 into a usable fuel on site, and then swap out the dirty fuel supply for the synthetic one. Now you have the functional equivalent of renewables + batteries — with the advantages that the plants are already built and wired into the grid, battery supply is no longer a bottleneck to rollout, and a lot of jobs are saved. So as a whole, as I see it, this would be faster, easier to plan, less wasteful, and more politically viable, as compared to replacing existing plants with brand new renewable ones that use battery storage. The same concept applies to vehicles. Our entire infrastructure around gasoline is already sitting and waiting to be used as a massive energy storage system. If carbon could be captured from the air using renewables and centrally processed into a backwards-compatible fuel, it would no longer be necessary to push so heavily for a transition to BEVs. Instead, consumers could choose solely based on the costs and benefits to themselves; maybe gas cars would be less efficient than BEVs (like the equivalent of running an app in Wine or Rosetta), but that would be reflected in the price of the fuel if so, with consumers eating the full cost rather than passing part of it along to society as a negative externality. Ditto for existing gas-powered stoves, heating, etc. Additionally, once it's running at scale, this system would naturally lend itself to the next step: transitioning from net-zero emissions to net-negative emissions. Governments could allocate funds toward buying carbon capture fuel and simply sequestering it away for emergencies, at least until atmospheric CO2 drops to pre-industrial levels. Maybe the same method would prove useful for terraforming other planets with inhospitable atmospheres as well. I'm very interested in seeing how United's experiments with synthetic fuel go for these reasons. Last time I brought this topic up on HN, someone shared Prometheus Fuels with me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Fuels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Fuels. Does anyone know how far along this kind of technology is? What factors have prevented the idea from already being implemented in traditional power plants at scale?