Don't get your hopes too high if you think this can be used to scrub significant amount of CO2 from atmosphere.
Don't get me wrong, producing fuel from atmospheric CO2 is still wonderful news.
But you know what they produce? Methane. And methane is what? It is A FUEL. And what we do with fuel? We BURN it. Once you burn methane you get the CO2 back, for net ZERO effect on the atmosphere.
The only way this works to help the climate is if you can use thus produced methane to remove need for mining actual gas. Unfortunately (or fortunately), we are already on the way to reduce a lot of mining for energy by replacing it with electricity. So according to Amdahal's law, the benefit is also going to be small.
Producing and burying methane clathrate is still impractical and would be very risky, because they can get resurfaced and then methane is hundreds of times more potent as warming agent than CO2.
It's even worse than zero net effect, it's negative, owed to all the auxiliary inefficiencies. Add to that methane slip and it's infeasible by a long shot.
The solution can never be to remedy surface-level GHG. The sources need to remain buried and replaced by true renewables. Anything else is just an afterthought, patching what's already too little too late. Almost all fossil-based material that made it to the surface will end up contributing to GHG.
Do not forget market forces: there would be a strong incentive to improve upon the CO2 scrubbing technology, which can then be used in the tech to permanently remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
Don't get me wrong, producing fuel from atmospheric CO2 is still wonderful news.
But you know what they produce? Methane. And methane is what? It is A FUEL. And what we do with fuel? We BURN it. Once you burn methane you get the CO2 back, for net ZERO effect on the atmosphere.
The only way this works to help the climate is if you can use thus produced methane to remove need for mining actual gas. Unfortunately (or fortunately), we are already on the way to reduce a lot of mining for energy by replacing it with electricity. So according to Amdahal's law, the benefit is also going to be small.
Producing and burying methane clathrate is still impractical and would be very risky, because they can get resurfaced and then methane is hundreds of times more potent as warming agent than CO2.