In the long term, electric vehicles may indeed replace ICE cars. That would be awesome. One way to see what we're doing is to make sure the path to that future is good. We can't burn fossil fuels while we wait to replace the existing vehicle fleet with electric cars. By using zero carbon we make sure that we are solving the problem right away.
You might want to focus on jet fuel, since we don't know how to make batteries with sufficient energy density for long range flights and don't know if such energy density will ever become possible.
It might also be worth looking at where airplanes tanker fuel, that is to say, carry more fuel than they need for their current leg because refueling at the next stop would be difficult or expensive. Apparently a lot of that currently happens on short flights to small islands; while I hope Wright Electric and/or the EViation Alice will eventually take over that market, in the short term that's a market that might be willing to pay a bit more for liquid fuel made from air plus local solar panels.
Fuel oil that can be burned in combined cycle power plants in the winter may also be valuable for dealing with seasonal imbalances in demand vs renewable generation that lithium ion batteries can't cost effectively balance.
4.5 is not so much. Gasoline is very energy dense, stores well (especially synthetic) and transports well. This is great - gas will be around for a long time to come - if we can shift the source of it to something better, I'm all for it.
1. Airplanes and boats will still need gas for a while
2. We’ll need to suck carbon out of the atmosphere anyway. So a process like this will be necessary, even if in the end the product needn’t be turned back into gasoline. This will be costly, but it’s the price we pay for all of the fuel we burn currently.
A gallon of petrol - 40 miles (realistcally and using UK gallon).
According to Tesla their charging is 92% efficient so reduce that 200 to 184 miles.
Your process is 4.5 times less efficient than just putting that electricity into the EV? Is that right?
If so - and your process is carbon neutral (big if) - what's the point in a future where EVs dominate?