IF petawatt-scale power is possible (and that's a big if), one of the cool things you could do is bottle it and send it where it's needed.
Literally.
How?
Turn it into oil. Crack seawater to get hydrogen and separate out CO2 that's dissolved as gas and carbonate. Fisher-Tropsch glue the two together.
With a petawatt of power, even if the process were only 50% efficient (which is roughly what US Naval Research Lab, Brookhaven National Lab, and MIT research suggest, you'd be synthesizing about 2,580 billion barrels of oil annually. The US currently consumes about 6 billion barrels, and total global extraction in 2013 was 317 billion barrels. That's 368 bbl/year per person on the planet (US consumption is 19 bbl/person-year).
So, yes, that's overkill, but you could put the additional energy to use, oh, say, sequestering carbon from the atmosphere (which, say, the surplus oil you're synthesizing pretty much is).
And if you burn the oil somewhere else later, it's actually pretty much OK. The stuff'll be clean (it's pure hydrocarbon, no contaminants), it's carbon-neutral (though if you're sucking seawater out of a single spot on the globe that might be an issue (we know that messing with ocean pH is a Less Than Desirable thing.
But it turns out we've got a pretty considerable global infrastructure for doing just that with oil.
Mind: I don't think fusion power will happen any time soon, possibly not ever. But if we actually did have that much power to play with, we could probably sort it reasonably well.
Literally.
How?
Turn it into oil. Crack seawater to get hydrogen and separate out CO2 that's dissolved as gas and carbonate. Fisher-Tropsch glue the two together.
With a petawatt of power, even if the process were only 50% efficient (which is roughly what US Naval Research Lab, Brookhaven National Lab, and MIT research suggest, you'd be synthesizing about 2,580 billion barrels of oil annually. The US currently consumes about 6 billion barrels, and total global extraction in 2013 was 317 billion barrels. That's 368 bbl/year per person on the planet (US consumption is 19 bbl/person-year).
So, yes, that's overkill, but you could put the additional energy to use, oh, say, sequestering carbon from the atmosphere (which, say, the surplus oil you're synthesizing pretty much is).
And if you burn the oil somewhere else later, it's actually pretty much OK. The stuff'll be clean (it's pure hydrocarbon, no contaminants), it's carbon-neutral (though if you're sucking seawater out of a single spot on the globe that might be an issue (we know that messing with ocean pH is a Less Than Desirable thing.
But it turns out we've got a pretty considerable global infrastructure for doing just that with oil.
Mind: I don't think fusion power will happen any time soon, possibly not ever. But if we actually did have that much power to play with, we could probably sort it reasonably well.