I like the way biological systems use waste streams from upstream to produce their own fuel.
There are some good projects to condense CO2 directly from the atmo , and convert to methanol and hydrogen. If placed next to manufacturing fuel cells and pipelines, these become economic leverages, and others will quickly implement them to pick up cost savings.
A lot is also regulatory, like electric co's restrictions against re-using the waste heat from processing ,
Good point about regulatory issues. I've been thinking a lot about working on standards committees and whatnot as they actually have influence and many standards/regulations/codes are bad.
Using waste streams is one of the more basic efficiency engineering approaches, and at this point I think if large gains were to be had from those, we'd have them already.
As for condensing CO2, there are tons of ideas along those lines, but I'm not sure carbon capture is worthwhile. I'd need to see more economic analysis of those ideas, or better yet, test implementations...
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