The opportunity, of course, is that it might become feasible to mine the air for carbon (and fold it with added electricity from transient sources like wind/wave/tide/solar) and compete with the folks pumping sequestered carbon fuels from the ground.

Of course, this wouldn’t compete with the use cases for petroleum that arise in refining the polymers in oil (think of all the plastics and other compounds that come out of the oil industry that aren’t refined fuels). Selling those products is so profitable that for years oil companies have been flaring off excess natural gas at the wellhead to be rid of it instead of spending the money to capture, contain, and ship it to market. On the one hand, if this tech to mine CO2 from the air becomes a competitor, 1 of 2 things happens:

• 1. Refined fuels become cheap, so cheap that they’ll be flared off as waste instead of captured
• 2. Petro-based polymers will become more expensive as their subsidy by the sale of refined fuels is undercut by competition

It’s probably #2, really refined fuels can be considered a waste product of extracting the petrochemicals