If you create hydrocarbon fuels with sequestered CO_2, driven by nuclear electricity, you have a clean, energy-dense battery. Plus, you don’t have to retrofit the entire automobile fleet.
Just make sure to do something about NOx emissions, the cause of the downfall of Diesel in many countries. As long as you burn just about any fuel - hydrocarbon or otherwise - using air you'll end up with NOx as a combustion by-product. Filtering out nitrogen from air is possible - zeolites are used for this purpose in oxygen concentrators - but hard to do at a high enough capacity to satisfy the needs of even modest-sized ICEs so a post-combustion NOx capture/conversion step will be needed regardless of the provenance of the fuel [1].
Sort of - but it doesn't solve the issue with air quality. Electrification of transport isn't just about CO2. We'll see more instant benefits from having air we can breathe.
A lot of the air pollution from cars is from brake dust and tire micro particles. EVs do result in less brake dust, but the tires are still a problem.
And if you live on the West coast, it was recently discovered that an essential chemical used for tire durability and safety causes mass deaths in salmon. (Or rather, the chemical breaks down into another chemical, which causes mass salmon death, and probably other fish death too).
I will appreciate never having to hear a damn diesel truck again, however. Those things should be taxed heavily for noise pollution in addition tk their massive particulate emissions.
Since you couldn't realistically replace all ICE vehicles right away, it'd help ease the transition and especially in rural areas, air quality might not be a big concern anyway. If you end up with a surplus of clean gas, you could just burn it in dedicated plants and take care of the NOx there, or use it for aviation and in agriculture.
Air quality is a problem that basically all of the first world has solved to varying extents that depend mostly on whether the local areas are affected are rich enough that it tops their lists of problems.
When the developing world gets rich they'll care too.
But liquid fuels are incredibly convenient, so maybe they will be worth the high price in certain applications. For example in jet engines for airplanes.
People already cycle through cars quite frequently. Big Auto doesn't need to convince anybody to buy a new car. This would be a purposeless conspiracy.
I don't think it's about making everyone buy new cars as much as about realizing that there's a new category of ultra-palatable government subsidies for them to cash in on.
