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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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You frame it like it's a bad thing but even if the process is mostly the same isn't that good? Also we can clearly improve on a 100 year old technology even if it's "solved".
My primary issue is that the entire article is somewhat deceitful. They use phrases like "never seen before", "unprecedented", "pioneering", but those characteristics do not really apply to the +90-year-old technology. The only significant part of the "process" that is different from what was uses in WWII is the specific flavor packs they add to the product.
Their deceitful comments about the technology have me questioning the veracity of the rest of their claims.
Don't get me wrong: I think that Fischer-Tropsch is one of a few important technologies we need to be adopting. The reason we need to adopt it is because it is incredibly energy intensive, but not necessarily time critical. It can provide a profitable sink for excess solar energy production during long summer days, to produce hydrocarbon fuels for the transportation and aviation industries, yet switch offline overnight, overwinter, and during inclement weather, when solar can't meet demand.
But we just don't consume enough butter for this application to be useful to solar generation.
The Air Force experimented with Fischer-Tropsch "SynFuels" about 15 years ago. They actually certified most/all military aircraft to burn SynFuels, to lessen our military's reliance on foreign oil.
If this process can tune how kling the R chains get, can't we use it as a viable petrochemical substitute? To at least make various feedstocks, albeit being energy intensive?
We don't need to make butter now - use it to fill niche applications where very precise chain lengths are needed (for cost/profits) then branch into other premium/environment sensitive applications?
Yes, and no. It can be technically viable, yes. That was the primary objective of the Germans in WWII, and the USAF recently: to replace lost oil reserves.
But it is very unlikely to ever be economically viable. Oil producers can easily underbid Fischer-Tropsch production.
Most of agriculture is also rarely economically viable without strong subsidies. Iirc sea oil drilling is also only made viable after strong initial subsidies.
Very few strategically important industries are economically viable without strong subsidies or regulations to start/protect them.
Catalytic converters and switch away from CFCs would have never taken off without regulations for example.