Why? Won't the advent of carbon-neutral synthetic fuels made with abundant solar energy (whether PV or thermal) start lowering the price of ICE-driven transport? What likely events would happen in the interim to raise the prices higher?
I predict that a carbon tax (or something similar) would motivate replacement of all ICE ground vehicles with battery electric before carbon capture becomes cheap. Then later when synthetic fuels arrive they'll only be used by airplanes. It's possible technologies could arrive in a different order though.
Oh, yeah, a carbon tax would certainly make it more expensive to run ICE ground vehicles. I don't think of that as a "technology" though.
When you say, "when synthetic fuels arrive", do you mean the Fischer-Tropsch process developed during World War I? I think that's the most likely candidate process for synfuels. It's reasonably efficient but it uses a lot of energy, because fuels contain a lot of energy — that's why we use them. By coincidence last week I read a bunch of papers by Heather Willauer et al. of NRL about producing synfuels with Fischer-Tropsch from seawater, using an electrolytic acidification process with cation exchange to drive CO₂ out of the water and generate the requisite hydrogen at the same time. The paper with the most comprehensive workout of the costs was ECONOMIC COMPARISONS OF LITTORAL PRODUCTION OF LOW CARBON FUEL FROM NON-FOSSIL ENERGY SOURCES AND SEAWATER, from 2017. You should read it if you're interested in the topic!
