The article and the video are short on details. A couple of remarks here
- they talk about diesel fuel. While diesel is very popular for passenger cars in Europe it's very rare in the US. How flexible is their process to produce e-gasoline?
- The article is conflating cost to produce e-diesel with retail price with regular diesel. It doesn't include wholesale and retail margins. Since the e-fuel is CO2-neutral, I assume it would be fuel tax free, but its competitiveness solely depends on high taxes on fossil fuels.
Also, electric car technologies are gaining ground and that will be direct competition to any synthetic fuels for ICEs in the coming decades.
We have diesel engines (trucks, rail, ships, and some passenger cars) in the USA and of course could have more.
This is not the issue. Fischer-Tropsch technology to make diesel like fuels out of methane has been around for decades. The Nazis used it when they could not get oil. The South Africans used it during apartheid when they could not get oil.
First problem: We don't use it because the economics of it suck pretty bad, though when we had cheap gas and $100 oil it probably would have made some sense if you could have locked in the spread. But you couldn't.
Second problem: Problem with Fischer Tropsch sucking even with cheap gas is compounded by making your gas expensive. Syn gas created from hydrogen and CO2 will be far more expensive than methane from drilling gas wells. If it weren't we could stop drilling the gas wells.
Third problem: When we want hydrogen in large quantities for industrial use, where do we get it? Sure as the heck not from electrolysis of water. This is an egregiously energy intensive process. We get hydrogen from steam reforming of methane. Obviously it would be a bit silly to get hydrogen by steam reforming of methane so we could convert the hydrogen back to methane.
Fourth problem: When we want CO2 in large quantities for industrial uses where to we get it? Sure as the heck not capturing it from the air. The CO2 concentration in the air is ~350 parts per million. Capturing enough of it from the air to meet our energy needs is an absurdity. And besides, if we could do it cost effectively we could solve global warming just by doing
that and containing the CO2. One of the ways we get CO2 in industrial quantities is drilling for it. Or getting it from the emissions of a power plant.
This is a great example of energy utopianism. They've hit a few hot buttons sure to resonate with utopians like "we'll get fuel from water!" and "we'll purify the air of CO2!" but it really bears no relationship to practical reality.
Even if you were going to spend all that energy and capital to get cleaner vehicles there would be more practical ways to do it.