Reply To: Fusion Oil

[Viking Coder]

Synthetic Fuel Concept to Steal CO2 From Air (white paper available)

$5 billion capital cost for a plant that produces 18,400 bbl/day synthetic gasoline. Nuclear power accounts for more than 50% of the total plant capital investment. The estimated operating cost is $1.40/gal for synthetic gasoline.

Somebody already did the math for me, and it looks good enough for these rough calculations. 90 kWh per gallon of synthetic gasoline produced from CO2 extracted from the atmosphere.
Los Alamos Developing Process for CO2 Capture and Stripping from Air for Synthetic Fuels Production

Guesstimate the nuclear power plant included in the plant’s capital cost at $3 billion, leaving a base capital cost of $2 billion.

18,400 bbl/day = 773,000 gallons/day => 70 million kWh = 3 GW

The estimates are lining up. This is a Good Thing™. $3 billion for a 3 GW 3rd gen nuclear plant seems perfectly reasonable, since that is the conventional estimate of $1/W.

A 3 GW FF composite plant, i.e. 600 5 MW units with a linked output, would have a capital cost of $180 million. It would use 3 tonnes of decaborane per year.

90 kWh/gallon @ 0.1 cents/kWh = 9 cents/gallon of gasoline in electricity cost

There is no telling how much of that $1.40/gallon operating cost is for the nuclear plant. Figure on amortizing the $2.2 billion capital cost over 10 years at a 18% interest rate. That works out to monthly payments of $40 million, or $1.70/gallon. Round it down to a cost of $3/gallon.
syngas plant capital cost amortization

A $2 billion synthetic gasoline plant powered by a $180 million FF plant, with CO2 extracted from the atmosphere as a feedstock, could produce 280 million gallons of gasoline annually, at a cost of $3/gallon.

It would take 480 such syngas plants to completely fill the US’s gasoline consumption, based on its 2004 figure of 134.4 billion gallons.
Gasoline Consumption by Country