Seems unlikely that we'll ever totally move away from combustion engines, simply due to sunk costs plus the advantages of energy density and quick refilling. I expect we'll see net-zero carbon emission gasoline and other hydrocarbons sold at the pump within the next few decades, produced with either solar or nuclear energy:
Compressed natural gas (methane) is even easier to synthesize from the raw ingredients than gasoline or diesel fuels. It's used today in many city buses, fleet vehicles, and private cars in certain parts of the world:
Such fuels could become less attractive if we invent lighter, cheaper, and much faster-charging batteries than the current state of the art, but I'm not holding my breath.
CNG/LNG have been around for a while and are yesterday's future. Synthetic zero carbon fuel simply loses too much in conversion to be economic, compared to direct EV. I think China is in the process of demonstrating what the transition looks like.
There will probably be a rump of difficult to convert use cases and long lives specialty vehicles. I imagine tractors will be the last holdout. And military uses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8zOHZINyG8
Compressed natural gas (methane) is even easier to synthesize from the raw ingredients than gasoline or diesel fuels. It's used today in many city buses, fleet vehicles, and private cars in certain parts of the world:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
Such fuels could become less attractive if we invent lighter, cheaper, and much faster-charging batteries than the current state of the art, but I'm not holding my breath.