Not because I care about CO2 in the air , this would make for the cheapest form of industrial CO2 anywhere.
$26 per tonne you can get it down to $15 with turboexpanders recouping the compression energy.
Why do you want CO2 cheap?
To make synthetic fuels with ultra cheap wind and peak day solar when it’s under $10 MWh or negative power rates and your grid op is curtailing power. Don’t curtail it or go negative make synfuels with it.
Ethanol can be made in an electrochemical cell at 93% electrons to ethanol molecules with some of the other 7% in ethane gas and acetylene gas.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/anie.201706311
Ethanol needs 5.6kg of CO2 per gallon and 24kWh of electrons.
$26 per tonne=1000kg
(26/1000)*5.6= 14.5 cents worth of CO2
26.5kWh of electrons is needed electrons that would be lost if curtailed. At $10 per MWh this is
($10/1000)=$0.01 or 26.5 cents of electrons.
Raw material cost is therefore 41 cents per gallon. Capex , opex put it into the $1 range with 10% ROI investor’s expect.
This is cheaper than you can buy corn ethanol at the distillery let alone on the wholesale market.
Propane can also be made electrochemically again from CO2 water and electrons at 90% Faraday efficiency.
Either is perfect fuel for MCCI engines that’s diesels to the non-scientists, Clearflame will convert your Cummins for you and every diesel can mist propane into the intake and use the idle setting to light it off as a “liquid speak plug”
Spark engines also can run on E100 they do it in Brazil all day every day. With a fairly simple gas injection tube just after the MAF sensor a regular gasoline engine can burn propane or gasoline/E100 bifuel set up.
https://www.iit.edu/news/closing-carbon-cycle-green-propane-production
The grid need to fundamentally reversed from a demand grid to a supply grid.
The grid should say this is what I can give you use all of it, not just trying to chase a phase angle and sync frequency aka demand chasing.
I didn’t include water in the above calcs because....
To produce one US gallon of ethanol (C2H5OH) electrochemically from (CO2) with a 93% Faradaic efficiency using boron-doped nanodiamonds, you would need approximately 0.84 gallons of water for the chemical reaction alone. At 2026 wholesale industrial water rates, this water is worth approximately $0.0028 (roughly 1/4 of a penny).
Propane is similar in water use and costs.