The low temp requirements look promising, but wake me up when the cost of the system at scale is known.
Obviously things like long haul aviation need synthfuels, but I wouldn't hold my breath that this will be the magic bullet for keeping the ICE relevant in the next century.
This is not really new, lots of people are writing papers on different paths to this.
There was a huge interest in synthesizing motor fuels from coal or natural gas up to 1980, it makes for depressing reading because the Fischer-Trospch chemistry for building up hydrocarbons from hydrogen and carbon monoxide has awful economics. For anything else people would be happy that iron works as a catalyst but they scoured the rest of the periodic table looking for something better and didn’t find it. You have to run the reaction at low temperatures otherwise you get nothing but methane, but under those conditions reactions that build up and break down hydrocarbons are closely balanced so you have a huge machine which makes a trickle of fuel so the capital costs are high.
Looking at the history you’d think somebody would tell the airplane engineers that they should just go clean sheet and figure out how to fuel airplanes with hydrogen or methane but they are so used to being coddled (like that time the FCC couldn’t make them upgrade their broken altimeters or how they are just barely starting to remove lead from GA fuel after all these years) that they are sending chemical engineers on what’s been a lost cause for more than a century.
Given how inefficient ICE is to begin with, I can't imagine something like this being used for any transportation that can be easily electrified. This is really for niche cases like air travel, I assume.
ICEs are incredibly efficient. Electricity is only efficient if you only care about kwh delivered to the car doing to the wheels. The efficiency of getting kwh from the grid to the car puts it well worse than most battery setups.
Grid losses are a few percent with modern tech (which exists in countries rich enough for EVs). Charger losses are another few percent. If you were to burn the same fuel in a closed cycle turbine you'd get about 1.5x the raw energy to the wheels after losses, but the turbine also doesn't need to use as high emissions fossil fuels. Regen and other efficiency features that are tolerated on EVs but not ICEs bring it up to about double well to wheel.
Then you can also provide 50-90% of the energy without it ever being made into AC by parking it under $1000 worth of solar panels.
The heat engines at fixed generating facilities are typically much more efficient than the engines in automobiles. Nearly a factor of 3 more efficient in some cases.
Obviously things like long haul aviation need synthfuels, but I wouldn't hold my breath that this will be the magic bullet for keeping the ICE relevant in the next century.