Cool, enviro-friendly gas! [turns around, pours fuel into gas tank, starts up engine] Oops! What's that coming out of the exhaust pipe? CO and CO2? Bummer! Sorry, Earth. Gotta have my ride, after all, right?

This is awesome as long as you don't then actually use the hydrocarbons. If you use them as an energy source you just two steps forward and two steps back! If the hydrocarbons are somehow taken out of the loop then great, go for it.

@MuznguMkubwa @Digitalclips Both of you don't understand that if hydrocarbons were produced from this renewable syngas and subsequently burned, there is no net change in atmospheric CO2 levels. Mainstream media has pounded into your heads that hydrocarbons are bad by definition. Hydrocarbons are only bad news if we extract it from the ground and burn it, so the net CO2 levels does change.

This would actually be a sustainable energy source as long as you don't burn any additional hydrocarbons extracted from the ground. You just recapture the CO2 you release while burning the fuel so the CO2 level in the atmosphere stays the same over time. The only problem would be with heath effects caused by byproducts of burning it.

We must get away from this primitive idea of burning everything. It creates even more waste heat in a world with an abundance of heat.

If we could use that hydrocarbon to make plastic or other products trapping the carbon, it would be great.
The future is DEFINITELY not in keep burning gas in combustion engines we drive in our local environments resulting in cancer causing hydrocarbons right at nose height.

@Digitalclips - I think you missed the idea behind this entirely. This is not an atmospheric co2 elimination technique, it is a carbon neutral way of providing energy storage and fuel. The idea here is that less-than or equal-to co2 is emitted when the fuel is burned, which is vastly preferable to burning NG and fossil fuels which does nothing to provide for removal of the carbon form the atmosphere.
It is also a way to reduce fossil fuel dependence and thus reduce foreign influence on the hosts economy. If the materials can be sourced locally or at least within the host nation it could serve to help stabilize that nations economy.
This is all assuming it can be scaled effectively and affordably of course. These kinds of things seem to be notoriously hard to commercialize.

...need oxygen to burn the 'synfuel' resulting in even more CO2 end product after combustion ?

This is great news. Science will eventually solve the crisis of CO2. I look forward to the day when this technology is positioned at the exit of every new power plant. Time to invest in these kinds of technologies. Remove the tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry and move it to the green energy industry.

Fantastic bit of science to use one result to perhaps solve two problems. However, what is really disappointing is the fact that the governor of Illinois has cut the U of Illinois's funding along with all of the other Illinois public universities [i.e. last year there was no budgeted amount of any of them]. This is a perfect example of why the governor of Illinois is so, so short sighted in trying to tear down and dismantle higher education in his state --