Crowd oil not crude oil

Imagine the renewable-electricity-powered air conditioning system in your house, apartment or office at work, besides functioning for cooling and heating, being adapted to capture carbon dioxide and water from the air. Imagine the water and carbon dioxide thus collected converted into renewable hydrocarbon fuels using existing technology and thereby creating personalized, localized and distributed, synthetic oil wells (see Fig. 1). As an alternative to legacy fossil fuel, these oil wells can be tapped, shared and stored, with the option for the property owner to receive payment for any excess fed into a renewable oil grid. Envision this model adopted globally and collectively. This could have a significant impact on the carbon dioxide load emitted into the atmosphere while safely storing available renewable electrical energy and heat in the form of high-energy-density chemical fuel, rather than in pressurized underground carbon dioxide reservoirs with a chance of leakage. As an illustration of the greenhouse gas reduction potential and renewable synthetic oil production capacity of the envisioned approach, a preliminary technical analysis for three practical cases, the Frankfurt Fair Tower office building, a typical grocery store and low-energy houses, is reported. This analysis impressively demonstrates that air conditioning systems in place if equipped with the appropriate technology could indeed capture a very significant amount of carbon dioxide. The envisioned model of crowd oil from solar refineries, akin to crowd electricity from solar panels, enables people to take control and collectively manage global warming and climate change, rather than depending on the fossil power industrial behemoths. The environmental, economic and social consequences of such a distributed renewable oil well technology should contribute to the practical realization of chemical fuels from carbon dioxide as feedstock in a circular sustainable economy of the future.