Eli5 of we can make lab diamonds on a large scale why can’t we do the same for oil and gas.
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Natural gas can actually be produced on a large scale (that’s biogas, made by letting organic waste decompose in a place without oxygen).
Oil, however, takes literally millions of years to form, so you can’t really produce it in factories.
Love this question.
Lab-grown diamonds are popular because they take a fraction of the cost to make than attempting to mine diamond. As another commenter pointed out, we CAN make natural gas at scale and cheaply – but oil is a little different.
We definitely can produce octane (or other oils/fuels) in a lab environment, but it takes a lot of energy and a lot of raw materials – meaning that it isn’t economically feasible to do so right now for a substance that we know pollutes the earth.
We’ve been trying, but there isn’t much of a reason to do so. It takes a bunch of energy to do. And since the primary use of oil and gas is for energy, why not just use that energy instead?
I work for an company that builds reactors to make hydrocarbons out of hydrogen and CO2.
And in the next step of the process out of the hydrocarbons things like diesel and petrol.
Edit: Spelling
Making diamonds uses energy – oil and gas provide energy, and it takes more energy than they make to make them (or substitutes) – we definitely could make replacements at scale given infinite energy
Crude petroleum is a product of time and pressure acting on biological compounds to form mixtures of a wide variety of different useful hydrocarbons, which are separated (or *refined*) and then used for a bunch of different purposes. A lot of those purposes involve using it as a component in synthetic chemistry, the chemistry of making new compounds (mostly plastics.)
You could certainly mix crude oil in a lab, we know what’s in it. But where would you get the components to mix? Well, the cheapest source is from refining petroleum, so that doesn’t serve any purpose. Ok, you could directly synthesize hydrocarbons instead, but that requires energy in the form of heat, and where would you get that?
From burning hydrocarbons, of course! So, there’s really no point in “lab oil”, because you’d always need either the components of petroleum or the energy of petroleum to do it most cost-effectively. So it’s simply not cost-effective.
We absolutely *could* do it, but it would be way more expensive than our current method of finding it in the ground and slurping it out.
We use gas because it releases A LOT of energy when we burn it. This is super useful for all the things we use it for, like cars. The energy *inside* the gasoline has to come from somewhere. Nature did all the work of creating that energy when it made the oil we slurp out of the ground, and that’s why it’s so much cheaper to just find some oil in the ground than to make it ourselves. It takes work for us to make oil, and that work costs way more than just finding some.
Imagine you wanted boulders on top of a hill so that you could push them off and watch them roll down the hill. It’s much easier to push boulders that are already on top of the hill than it is to roll boulders all the way up the hill.
Oil is like a soup broth that has had rare ingredients cooking in it spanning millions of years. Sure, you can toss a bouillon cube in some boiling water to start a pot of soup, but crude oil is like a witches brew containing so many useful compounds that take so long to form that you basically can’t shortcut it.
Edit: The point about diamonds is that they are basically one pure substance (carbon) subject to specific conditions. Crude oil contains super complicated molecules, which themselves came from super complicated systems like plants or animals.
Deep in the earth, there are a quadrillion tons of diamonds. However, getting to them is expensive.
There is only roughly 50 years of most fossil fuels left on earth. However, there are many alternatives to fossil fuels that are cheaper to make than making synthetic fossil fuels: biodiesel or alterative forms of energy like solar.
So, it all comes down to “cost to get something done” when there are multiple ways to get something done.
Oil and gas are used for energy. If it takes more energy to create them, than you get out of them it’s worthless. If they are in the earth, already full of energy, then it is worth it to spend a bit of energy to get them out of the earth.
Diamonds take energy to make, but their price doesn’t depend on how much energy you can get out of them, instead it depends on how pretty they are (+marketing).
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