Where's the electricity coming from? If your answer is natural gas, or oil powered generators, then no, there isn't a price point where it will break even.
Now if you can answer that question with nuclear reactors or renewables of any kind, then your logic probably applies. Yet, I doubt it will ever be the main fuel powering our transportation.
"We have limited our studies to nuclear power because its capital costs are lower than wind and solar-electric power, and it has significant environmental advantages over fossil energy sources, which are not carbon-neutral."
If I already own a perfectly good ICE car, as most people do, it's much less wasteful to start feeding it synthetic gasoline than replacing the whole car with an EV. And the benefits are immediate.
Edit: Also, the energy density of hydrocarbons is unmatched. Synthetic kerosene could be used to run 747's; battery technology can't do that.
>If I already own a perfectly good ICE car, as most people do, it's much less wasteful to start feeding it synthetic gasoline than replacing the whole car with an EV
Actually this is incorrect. 75% of the energy used by a gasoline car is in the fuel it takes to drive it, and only 25% in manufacturing and disposal.
It's the same situation with incandescent lights. It's mathematically more efficient to throw out a perfectly good one and replace it with something more efficient.
>Synthetic kerosene could be used to run 747's; battery technology can't do that.
The entire point of the question I asked was: given energy source, what is the comparison between 1) sending out electricity to batteries, or 2) creating liquid carbon-neutral fuels.
Why doesn't natural gas count? It's increased usage is one of the key reasons the US's carbon output is down over 10% since 2005.
> "There are two basic factors that have contributed to lower carbon intensity (CO2/kilowatthour [kWh]) in the electric power sector: 1) substitution of the less-carbon-intensive natural gas for coal and petroleum, and 2) growth in non-carbon generation, especially renewables such as wind and solar."
It's impossible to win with converting a fossil fuel X into something and then to convert back to fossil fuel X, because of basic thermodynamics. If you want to convert fossil fuel X to something to convert to fossil fuel Y, you may be able to "win" over the current situation but you will very likely never get to get zero emissions in the system as a whole, because of the first step. It isn't necessarily impossible to burn X tons of CO2 and pull X+delta tons of CO2 out of the air, depending on the exact binding energies of the chemicals involved (which given that both are fuels, probably don't have an advantageous difference you can exploit), but you'll certainly be paying somewhere else to do it. And given that pulling CO2 out of the air at scale is quite challenging even on its own merits, it probably can't win in a practical manner.
If you're going to pull CO2 out of the air you pretty much have to be using a non-CO2-generating power source to do it if you want to net CO2 withdrawal.
No. Electric cars that charge on fossil fuels face the Carnot cycle loses exactly once, just like internal combustion ones. They are competing on what are details when compared to another cycle.
The back story for electricity is peer grid and arbitrage techniques. Power grid should be just like the internet - every endpoint can produce as well as consume services. Would this allow for grid defection? Don't know, but it will radically change the model for energy economics for sure.
But if you could guarantee that huge energy demand for nuclear reactors, then it would (economically) justify the scale-up that would allow nuclear to power a bigger share of transportation: they could just run at high loads all the time and simply use any excess to produce liquid fuel.
Now if you can answer that question with nuclear reactors or renewables of any kind, then your logic probably applies. Yet, I doubt it will ever be the main fuel powering our transportation.