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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The goal of diamonds are to look cool. They’re more or less permanent. The goal of fossil fuels is to release their chemical bonds and use the energy to power things. It takes more energy to create fossil fuels than we get from urning fossil fuels for energy. See fossil fuels are mostly the organic remains of single celled photosynthetic life. The natural energy to form the fuels comes from solar radiation, gravitarional compaction, and thermal heating from the earth’s core which comes from formation of the earth and radioactive decay of element.
We could theoretically create artificial fossil fuels using solar, wind and nuclear power, but to do so would require essentially tripling the the power capacity of the grid. It is an interesting goal, basically we’d be making liquid batteries. Really of we switched to certain jet fuels instead of gas, the US Navy has a process to convert ocean water to jet fuel. However carbon capture facilities would be more cost effective. Ultimately fossil fuels are super cheap.
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