I find this pretty incredible.

Where are the land and water use analyses of such a massive increase in biofuels?
Not just for the comparatively well-endowed US, but if they want to fly back again, from the rest of the world?

Of course this is finessed by the fact that for the foreseeable future, the SAF is to be in homeopathic quantities only.

It is often contrasted to hydrogen, but how much hydrogen would need to be produced anyway to put in the biofuels, to make this work at all?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2452223622001286

' When considering the BTL process, we note that H2 intervenes in a different way. Recent advances show that its addition to syngas boosts the fuel output at least by a factor of 2.5–3.0. In their pioneering study in 2015, Hannula et al. demonstrated that hydrogen-supplemented FT-synfuels were more cost-effective than non-biomass synfuels (electrofuels), especially for a levelized cost of H2 below 2.2–2.8 €/kg [38]. Based on kinetic models, it has been published that the carbon efficiency of the BTL process can be increased from ca. 35% to more than 90% by adding H2 from renewable resources, namely hydrogen produced through high-temperature water-electrolysis, with a hot steam generated from the high-temperature syngas [39]. The integration of H2 allows to modulate the H2/CO ratio of the syngas to optimal values and to get rid of the WGS step, which explains the improvement of the carbon efficiency [40]. In this case, the levels of hydrogen to be introduced to boost the process also remain high since recent literature reports values ranging from 0.19 to 0.28-ton H2 per ton of fuel produced [41].'

@SJC:
'ETH spin-off Climeworks operates a plant in Iceland that currently captures 4,000 metric tons of CO2 a year, at a cost per metric ton of between 1,000 and 1,300 dollars. But how quickly can these costs come down as deployment increases?

ETH researchers have developed a new method that provides a more accurate estimate of the future cost of various DAC technologies. As the technologies are scaled up, direct air capture will become significantly cheaper—though not as cheap as some stakeholders currently anticipate. Rather than the oft-cited figure of 100 to 300 U.S. dollars, the researchers suggest the costs are more likely to be between 230 and 540 dollars.'

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-03-air-carbon-capture-higher.html

The study on which this is based is available here:

https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(24)00060-6?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS2542435124000606%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

I have had a good read of the basis of their analysis, and DAC with any tech we have or can reasonably expect to have for the foreseeable future remains in the realm of 'pull the other one, its got bells on' !

Plants do a better job than anything we have anywhere near the ability to do.

Whatever the irresponsible shenanigans in the aircraft and tourist industry, nothing should obscure what a boon non biological CO2 removal would be to the climate.

The previous analysis I linked could, of course, only deal with techs which were about or extrapolations of what we had, and did not refer to something from left field, as you can't analyse that by the nature of things, much as studies of climate change do not account for what would happen in the event of the second coming or whatever.

All that we need to do is find out if this works, see it can be done in series as a cascade, prove it economically, ramp it to billions of tons a year and finance it!

Easy-peasy!