The flared natural gas is happening because it's too expensive to ship it away versus what it's worth. I'm not sure what you gain by burning the natural gas into CO2, and then converting it back into a hydrocarbon again only for it to again be marooned...
There are places you can get energy from to do this for sure. But you're still putting energy into an energy conversion, not getting energy out of CO₂. (Unless you're doing some kind of late stage stellar nucleosynthesis fusion, which... you're not)
The headline should be: "Fuel components from air synthesized into liquid fuel using energy from some other energy source"
An inefficient process is still infinitely more efficient than nothing.
I think there’s an opportunity to formalise an excess energy marketplace, established with an inefficient process to get the ball rolling. From there, market forces can dictate winners.
The big thing here is in theory we could put something like a nuclear plant(which people are afraid of) in a remote area and produce fuels we are already equipped to use from that pretty major energy source.
Combine that with Solar storage and geo-thermal storage using that and maybe we will continue to have enough movable energy to have long distance travel that isn't wind driven.
