This is a completely accurate comment. Why is it downvoted?
I assume the company is operating in the US. In the US only 27% of electricity is from coal and falling.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
And in California (where nearly half of the US's electric vehicles reside--with EVs achieving a nearly 8% market share last year among light vehicles), it's MUCH less than that. There's only a single, tiny 63MW coal co-generation plant in the state, so coal power is less than 1% of California electricity.
> Even electric vehicles aren't carbon neutral, because they're mostly charged by coal power.
Additionally, it's absurd to compare two consumers of electricity, both of which are flexible with respect to time of consumption, and just arbitrarily say one is mostly coal power (which is false) and the other isn't.
We definitely need carbon neutral or even carbon negative industrial processes. I kind of question the logic of going for fuels versus more valuable non-fuel feedstocks, however. A maybe 50% efficient conversion of electricity to alcohols with a typical 20% energy conversion of fuels to mechanical power gives you about an order of magnitude less efficiency than battery-electric.
And if you ARE insistent on making carbon neutral fuels: Makes more sense to focus on things that are super hard to electrify, like long-haul aircraft and transoceanic shipping and maybe heating fuels for the far north (where air source heat pumps lose their effectiveness in January).
But I'm glad an electrochemical process is being developed, here. Electrolysis and related processes are much preferable, IMHO, than the more common thermal processes.