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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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Sound like coal butter, which existed in WW2 but was discontinued because of inefficiency.
No the most important question is how much energy does it take?
So direct air capture, instead of industrial waste CO2, good luck with that.
It takes a lot, but not nearly enough.
The real problem with solar generation is seasonal variation. Think about the generation capacity we need during a 9-hour, overcast, winter day. Now, think about that same array under clear summer skies, when we are getting 15 hours of daylight.
It's barely meeting demamd in winter, but it is producing 4-10 times as much power as we actually need in summer. Grid storage is the usual suggestion for mitigating the limitations of solar generation, but no amount of grid storage is feasible for leveling seasonal variations.
Energy-intensive Fischer-Tropsch technology could soak up that excess summer power production, and shit off for the winter, making it profitable to deploy those large solar arrays. But we don't consume nearly enough butter to make this a viable approach at mitigating seasonal variation. To make it useful for promoting solar rollouts, we would need to be producing jet fuel, not butter.
If capitalism has taught me anything, it's that it won't be used like this. There is only one way the producers of this butter would tie production to excess solar capacity, and that is if it's the most profitable. That would require that the cost of solar + storage + transport is cheaper than using another source of energy, on demand. And that's even assuming there's enough excess solar to run the whole thing, and the logistics don't get in the way of maintaining the supply chain.
The Fischer-Tropsch process can be uses to produce any hydrocarbon product. We don't use enough butter for it to feasibly soak up excess solar generation in the summer.
But we do use enough jet fuel, diesel, and gasoline.
Thats not an assumption. That is the specific problem we need to overcome for solar to replace coal and nuclear. Already, we have summer, daytime generation rates going negative because we have not adequately adapted to the seasonal variation in solar. Those negative rates are massively hurting solar rollouts around the world.
We need massive, seasonal electrical loads to make solar profitable during spring/summer/autumn, so that we have sufficient generation capacity available through winter.
Storage is important for matching the daily generation curve to the daily demand curve, but we can't hope to match seasonal variation. It would be easier to shift power across the equator than to build out enough storage to solve the seasonal variation problem.