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Whitepaper: Road to synthetic hydrocarbons cheaper than drilled oil (2022)

Posted by justintiime |3 hours ago |1 comments

justintiime 3 hours ago

I’ve been looking into the thermodynamics of carbon capture.

Instead of viewing carbon capture as a thermodynamic penalty funded by offset credits, the whitepaper outlines a path to making it an economic inevitability. The core thesis relies on the continued scaling laws of cheap solar: as solar LCOE drops, it eventually becomes cheaper to synthesize hydrocarbons directly from atmospheric CO2 and sunlight than it is to drill mile-deep holes to extract legacy oil and ship it from the other side of the world.

It's a fascinating look at bypassing the energy-scarcity mindset of traditional Direct Air Capture by just brute-forcing the problem with hyperscale and cheap solar.