If you're a central planning committee trying to solve for the best outcome under physical constraints, nothing beats nuclear power and railroads.

If you're living in an economic system where investment is primarily determined by rate of profit, then you need to identify a solution where everyone involved is making more money than they would be without you. So it's very important they're competing with oil on economic terms while increasing demand for solar.

It's not natural gas if you're synthesizing it!

Methane has some significant advantages over electricity: it's storable over time and can be used to fuel vehicles. About a third of the vehicles in this country are methane-fueled, in fact. A CNG tank is a hell of a lot cheaper than a car-sized lithium battery. If you go further and make the methane into kerosene you can fly airplanes with it. Airplanes can't fly while they're plugged into the grid.

In the long term, complete displacement of hydrocarbons from the economy is probably the end goal. However, we are nowhere near being able to do that right now. Obviously for the billions of vehicles on the road and the current grid power generation we need not just solar/wind generation, but also massive amounts of grid storage (or massive increases in nuclear) and vehicle batteries. But in industry there are tons of chemical processes that also require hydrocarbons that we haven’t found suitable replacements for yet.

Because it’s not clear how fast we can get absolutely massive amounts of grid storage or nuclear deployed, finding ways to make effectively carbon-neutral natural gas/petroleum is a good step in the right direction, where we can continue to use some hydrocarbons without a net increase in greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and oceans.

It’s also not clear if we will be able to replace all of our current petroleum reliant industrial processes with non-carbonized alternatives, and in those cases, this will be the absolute best case for us.