Everyone is on the electric car bandwagon and while I think it probably will represent a good chunk of the future I doubt it will have a monopoly. But I’ve always thought (at least for the past 10ish years) that synthetic fuel would be a game changer. Imagine coming up with a process that pulls CO2 out of the air and combines it with hydrogen to recreate the hydrocarbon chains that make up our fuel. We’d still keep our ICEs and the infrastructure in place already would still work. This is probably the first news on anything on that front that I’ve heard in a while.
I don’t know if petroleum companies are secretly investing in this or not, but it would make sense for them as a means to hedge against the finite resource that is “natural” petroleum. But, progress seems to be slow, though not insurmountable as this article seems to suggest. I know any process like this will be energy intensive, but combine a plant like this with a renewable power plant where it can use excess capacity during off peak hours and you have a good way to stay carbon neutral.
It’s still prohibitively expensive but at some point technology will bring that cost down enough that it will be sustainable from a business sense too.