If that money was invested in something like reducing the cost of manufacturing Infrared Rectifying Antennas, we could be powering everything that extracted fuel would have with 100%-efficiency solar capture that works night and day... and which rather than being consumed would lasts as long as the Sun does. But that's long-term thinking, and represents another discussion probably.
You've sort of skimmed over the vast majority of problems with said antennae
, such as:
1) Infrared gets absorbed by the atmosphere really well; optical would be much more likely to be the way to go, even factoring in the fact that it wouldn't work near as well at night.
2) Even our best estimates right now put the antennae eventually at the place of "less efficient than current solar cells, but cheaper per m
2 (not factoring in efficiency)".
3) These things are currently a pipe dream; we've manufactured a very small handful of them that are
almost small enough in labs to actually function. We're nowhere near to being able to make them efficiently, even if you drowned all the researchers in money (For reference the goal length of a single antenna is less than a micrometer; that's a
lot of antennas that we need to make to even fill a single m
2).
4) Current efficiencies, due to a bevy of other problems with things like the capacitors avaliable, etc. are currently rocking at around 10
-5%. Normal solar panels are currently at around 15%, and are currently projected to always be more efficient.
Honestly at this point you'd be better off just dropping all that money into regular old solar power plants. (Of course this also doesn't address the fact that one of the major reasons we use gasoline nowdays isn't necessarily for it's efficiency, but rather for the fact that it's energy density is so high, which makes it very useful for things like vehicles, and modern batteries are just
barely starting to catch up with it in the vehicle market, in which case you would want to dump the money into a combination of battery and nuclear energy research instead.)