The energy ratio and cost being terrible doesn't matter for some PR usecases.
Imagine being able to sell Formula 1 this fuel so the whole industry can claim to be green and try and try to re-attract young crowds who are turned away by un-greenness?
The fuel could cost 100x as much, and it still wouldn't be a big issue.
"Imagine being able to sell Formula 1 this fuel so the whole industry can claim to be green and try and try to re-attract young crowds who are turned away by un-greenness?"
I loled. They could use ground unicorn for fuel, and I still wouldn't be interested.
There are other ways besides biology that hydrocarbons can be
produced. Pure water placed between diamond anvils at high temperature and enormous pressure will spontaneously produce hydrocarbons. Titan's atmosphere is mostly hydrocarbons that didn't come from living things.
They state "It costs more than a barrel of oil right now, but in places with a price on carbon of $200 a ton, like what’s enabled through California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, we’re competitive". Today, the carbon price in the European cap-and-trade scheme is $81 per ton, and in California it's $29 per ton. So unless they've greatly improved efficiency, they don't have a profitable market.
The EU price is also only that high since about a year ago, two years ago it was about $23 per ton. Even if they were profitable at about $80 per ton, there was little time to scale up production.
$200/ton is 20c/litre (assume specific gravity of 0.75, and fuel being 75% carbon by mass).
Here in Ireland, tax on petrol is around €1/litre (VAT + excise duty + "carbon tax", but it all goes to the same place). A 20c extra subsidy would not quite be noise, but it's less than the price fluctuates from quarter to quarter anyway.
From a theoretical standpoint you can argue that the "fair" price of fuel would include the costs of any environmental and economical damage done by burning that fuel: the cost of health issues from particulates, the infrastructure costs to deal with sea level rise, the costs from droughts that are worse because of increased CO2 in the atmosphere, etc. Just because those happen to somebody else than the person burning the fuel doesn't mean that the costs don't happen.
And the best way we currently have to price in those externalities is artificially rising the price of the offending product, to give alternatives a better chance to compete.
1. The level of taxation is not connected at all to the cost of the externality. You know the externality exist so then you level that as the justification.
2. The taxation being collected is not being used to curb the harm of the externality, instead it is being used as a punishment for those that need or choose to use something the government has determined to be "bad"
If you want to ride in on an ethical horse of attempting to recover externality costs then the regulation needs to be done in such away that it both ties the amount of taxation to the actual cost of the externality, and any money collected from that taxation is used solely for the mitigation of harm caused by that externality
Some basic economics 101 reading can set you straight here.
It's a legitimate function of government to craft regulation when there are negative externalities distorting markets.
Sometimes government regulation makes markets more free. Crazy, I know, but please let it sink in.
If it helps: you can think of producers that rely on negative externalities as freeloading evil socialists who redistribute other people's wealth (without consent) to themselves.
That is one way to look at it, I disagree with this however even taking at face value you need to calculate the actual cost of the externality and then recover that
here they are saying "Well we need the price set to X to be competitive" that has nothing to do with calculating the cost of the externality, which may be lower (or higher) the taxation needed to bring this product to be price comparable
