For every molecule of CH4 TI creates, they're pulling a molecule of C02 out of the atmosphere to do it. When you burn a CH4 molecule from a Saudi well, you're moving carbon from the ground into the atmosphere.
Big Oil has rivers of money to lobby and make sure carbon-neutral fuel startups can't legislate them out of the market.
This makes the synthesis much more efficient, because you need far less energy and space to capture the CO₂.
Even if all power plants could turn carbon-free, steelmaking and production of cement cannot, they involve CO₂ as a key chemical step. Until 100% of steel is recycled, and concrete is replaced entirely by something else, you will still have stable, rich sources to run your synthesis off of.
The location advantage then becomes your greatest disadvantage.
it's just like installing solar in parts of the Sahara. Land is cheap and sunshine is abundant. Until an Al-Qaeda affiliate seizes one of your solar farms or the local government is overthrown and the coupists are trying to extort you. Now, how much will you spend hiring mercenaries to retake and occupy a foreign country, even if you discount international backlash?
It is going to be hard to adopt 2-4x more expensive fuel across your fleet, just because.
I'm not trying to take an endorsing position on e-fuels, but wanted to note Prometheus talked in one of their interviews and argued they would work around tensions with 'big oil' not via legislation but having direct customer relationships with competitive price commitments:
From interview of Rob McGinnis ( https://curiositypodcast.substack.com/p/future-of-sustainabl... ) of Prometheus Fuels:
"We have not gone to raise money from anybody in oil and gas. We've always said we wanted to go to our customers and form relations with them. So that's why a car company and a shipping company, for example. And we did LOIs with airlines. The ones that got published was with American Airlines. We said we'd give them 10 million gallons of jet fuel for one cent less than the spot price of Jet A."
edit Depleting their entire reserves of gas would be stopping because it's unsustainable, not because it's not carbon neutral. Also that sounds like a really bad idea.
We also can't afford to stop using it by "running out" since that implies we burned it all.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_g...
