This may sound unrealistic now, but it may be worth planning for this possibility. If we do manage to change over to energy systems with a sizeable electrical storage capacity, and if we can fix most of the energy we use from renewable sources such as solar and we can move that energy around easily and quickly over large distances, then an issue that will arise in a probably surprisingly brief number of years would be what to do with surplus energy. If the local electrical storage systems are saturated the excess energy could be put into hydro but that might also fill soon enough.
One idea might be to try to start up a carbon cycle for fuels. That is, instead of collecting, transporting and then burying carbon dioxide, it may be possible to recycle the carbon from the carbon dioxide by using the surplus solar energy to create artificial carbon fuels. Within a carbon trading scheme these artificial carbon fuels would be especially valuable. They should benefit from carbon credits at least twice over. First through the CO2 taken out of the atmosphere, secondly through displacing the carbon that would normally be also added to the atmosphere through normally sourcing that carbon fuel from crude oil, and there may be some transport and location benefits as well (as well as other geopolitical benefits over time). Consumers might also we willing to pay premium prices for recycled carbon fuel, or petrol blends with some proportion of recycled artificial fuel. The fuel could also be pure hydrocarbons. Water supplies may be an issue.
Motor vehicle fleets may take some time to change over completely to electrical, provided the energy storage problems are sufficiently solved, so it would still be worthwhile to consider building plants that could use surplus solar energy to convert CO2 into carbon fuels. Such a plant may be more than a decade away, but it is a possibility that might be worth thinking about now, and perhaps planning for as it becomes a more realistic option.
The change over to electrical storage systems and renewable energy sources would completely change the economics of energy. The cost of energy would no longer be based around scarcity, and maybe there may be a time similar to the post WWII boom when energy was cheap. Recycled carbon fuel is a way to store excess solar energy, or ease the transition from our current energy patterns to a more sustainable one. But it would be considered a wasteful use of solar energy initially.
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