There is a company called Solar Foods which is exploring exactly that: they use solar power to produce hydrogen, feed that hydrogen and CO2 to Xanthobacter bacteria, and harvest the produced protein.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016777992...

From what I've seen, 10,000 barrels per year is a reasonable guestimate.

If that is the case, then just the electrical energy harvested from solar panels in the UK could convert air into fuel at a faster rate than the WHOLE earth (on average over geological time scales) (as long as the fuel conversion/production was at least 1% efficient at converting electricity to fuel).

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1owp09/if_oil_t...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209624951...

The real question isn't about using biofuels in place of electric power, it's most important in place of other fuels in applications where electrification isn't possible, like air travel.

Air travel is not only the fastest form of travel in common use, it's also one of the most efficient, due to the thin air at cruising altitudes. If jet fuel derived from sugarcane or switchgrass becomes cost effective, airplanes can be solar powered for cheap.

We know that ethanol isn't really energy efficient. We do it partly because we like having way, way too much food capacity (as a matter of security), and partly because we love to fetishize farmers (especially the ones in Iowa, who get a lot of attention every four years during Presidential campaigns).

It'd be wise to look at all the variables.

Leadership that caters to special interests instead of the overall, long term benefit of citizens and organizations.

Nothing illustrates this better than energy policy and the foibles thereof.

Ethanol is a particularly bad idea that only came about due to the farm lobby.

Solar and renewables are progressing despite policy oppostion.

Cheap energy offers a significant competituve advantage --- that USA policy openly and stupidly rejects.

2.6M - 5.7M hectares (10,000-22,000 sq miles), less than half of this ethanol land, would power all electricity in the US:

https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...

For other comparisons, there are roughly 0.8M hectares of rooftop in the United States (table ES-1 here, 8.13e9 sq m https://docs.nlr.gov/docs/fy16osti/65298.pdf).

Looking at LLNL's flowchart of energy in the US:

https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2024-12/e...

that solar will produce ~13 quads of energy. That's out of a total of only 32.1 quads total of all energy services delivered. When electrifying from fossil fuels to electricity, we only need to (roughly) meet that 32.1 of services; EVs very efficiently deliver electricity to the purpose of movement, ICE are like 20%-30% at best. Burning fossil fuels for heat is ~99% efficient, but heat pumps give you 300%-400% efficiency because they move heat rather than convert electricity directly to heat.

So converting all ethanol land use to solar would power the entire US; that's ignoring all the wind power we generate, all the hydropower we generate, all the next generation geothermal that will probably come online over the next decade. And at the base of it all, storage is super cheap these days!

The transition is possible now, it will be cheaper than fossil fuels, and the longer we let fossil fuel misinformation deceive us, the more we will waste on expensive energy.

"The full technical potential of next-generation geothermal systems to generate electricity is second only to solar PV among renewable technologies and sufficient to meet global electricity demand 140-times over."

https://www.iea.org/reports/the-future-of-geothermal-energy/...