He admits that it is not simple to pull the sugars out of non-food material like pulp or wood waste, but says that even factoring in the extraction process, the final cost should be lower than using corn starch or sugar cane, both of which are much higher-priced commodities.
That said, if the process really can be made to work, CO2 would go from being a polluting waste product to a valuable raw material, and it might even become worthwhile building systems to capture it and pipelines to ship it around.