[ROCKMAN]

""It's now possible to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, and use it as a feed stock, with hydrogen, to produce net zero emission fuels." Of course it is: there are many solutions that are physically possible. We could run every vehicle in the US on solar generated power. Of course what happens isn't solely dependent what can be physically done but what can be affordable to do.

Da!

[hvacman]

There are some serious thermodynamic smoke and mirrors going on here. They not only claim to be able to pull out CO2 from the air using heat from natural gas, but to be able to use some of that heat to sequester the CO2 resulting from burning the natural gas, then slam the resulting carbon together with "renewably" generated hydrogen to make new hydrocarbon fuel.

The process of combining carbon with hydrogen into a hydrocarbon molecule is very, very endothermic (takes a lot of energy). It's why burning the fuel and breaking the carbon-hydrogen bond is so exothermic (releasing energy). Scads of energy has already been consumed with extracting the carbon from the air and extracting the hydrogen from water (even if it was "renewable" energy). So now we add more energy (renewable? from the natural gas above?) to combine them into a hydrocarbon, closing the cycle.

And this is an energy miracle? Sound more like a hydrocarbon cycle perpetual motion machine. It does indeed require a miracle - as, to quote Feynman, "nature can not be fooled". But Bill Gates can be...

[StarvingLion]

Rockman and his supply and demand, market bullshit. He doesn't even know the history of oil. What a loon.

Under conditions of excess supply capacity, unmanaged pre-1930 in the US, nominal prices fell to $0.13/bbl. The governors of Oklahoma and Texas called out the National Guard, the latter the Texas Rangers as well, to seize wellhead production under force of arms to raise nominal prices to $1/bbl and avoid extraction practices which would have ultimately left much of the resource unrecoverable. The result was a 40-year period under which the Texas Railroad Commission effectively regulated the global supply of oil, and its price, which remained remarkably consistent from 1945 (post WWII) through 1973.

[hvacman]

Now I've seen everything - SL trying to give the RM a lesson on the history of Texas oil and the Texas RRC. You are a funny one, SL!