As one example, imagine that someone invents a process to manufacture gasoline using carbon extracted from the air, at a price that's cost competitive with gasoline extracted from the ground.
Any car running on that as fuel would immediately become carbon-neutral, and it could be produced anywhere on the planet. Almost overnight you could make the entire automotive industry carbon neutral (burning this gasoline would merely return the carbon into the air that was sequestered when the gas was produced) without needing to replace all the cars on the road.
Who would pay for it? Everyone. Individuals would buy manufactured gasoline to power their cars. Governments all over the world would subsidize its production both for environmental reasons (to meet Paris targets), and for energy security to reduce their dependence on oil imports.
That would be a license to print money and could probably produce a trillionaire.
Exactly. Elon Musk announced a few weeks ago that SpaceX Starship will be fueled from atmospheric carbon. They're building a process to pull carbon fuel out of the air on Earth -- and on Mars.
Yes, once you sort out the industrial process the price of manufactured gasoline would be driven by the local price of electricity at the production site.
Thermodynamics isn't the only thing to consider. There are parts of the world where spot electricity rates routinely go negative, because it's cheaper to pay a consumer to absorb excess electricity than it is to shut off a power plant. A process like this could absorb excess electricity when there's an excess of electricity.
You don't need to talk about fusion or thorium reactors when the cost of solar is low and falling, and we haven't _nearly_ saturated the planets capacity for generating electricity through solar. A combined facility that generated electricity through solar, then either sold electricity or manufactured gasoline (whichever is better in the moment)
There is already a process for it and it's called biodiesel [0]. It has its own range of problems and is not as sexy as the electric cars (that depend on rare earth metals for production of batteries with limited recyclability BTW), but could be much more sustainable long-term.
There's a tipping point where it becomes unprofitable to keep existing gas stations open. Then due to lack of available fueling options ICE vehicles rapidly decline. The same thing could happen with financing - as soon as lease payments and average electricity costs are less than monthly fuel costs, the incentive to go ICE will rapidly decline. Especially if range is similar to gas. Not quite there yet.
Yes, it could. Actually that's one concern I have looking forward past the current climate crisis: that the current push to solve climate change will spin up a huge industry of carbon capture and sequestration, which will turn the word's economy carbon negative. Atmospheric carbon plummets -- as fast as it's currently rising -- and we put the Earth into an ice age.
Basically humanity has reached the point where we need to learn to regulate our global carbon emissions to keep the atmosphere at a steady state. We're just now starting to figure out how to down-regulate our carbon emissions; after that we'll need to figure out how to up-regulate it in a controlled way.
But the number of people who will is very obviously tiny. For any well-off individual, it's cheaper to buy their way out of the downsides. Everyone else is wondering about rent and (in the US) healthcare with a lot more immediacy.
We can see this from the low takeup of carbon offsets.
