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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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.
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