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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This seems like a perpetual motion machine type problem. Energy made without expending more energy than it costs to make.
These two consumables diamonds, and fuel aren’t consumed at the same rate. Lab grown diamonds aren’t “consumed” nearly at the rate “fuel” is. So “growing” fuel on a large scale is not financially sustainable.
Ethanol is a fuel “grown” and still is not on the scale of crude.
Another consideration is infrastructure. The plants making fuel are already built and operating. Takes a lot of money to make a new plant to make different fuel.
The benefit of fossil fuels is that it has potential energy.
Consider this analogy. If instead we found a vein of Lithium ion batteries. That would be so much cheaper to mine up and sell, than making our own batteries.
Synthetic oil is possible, but you still need to get the equivalent energy into the material.
we can and there’s various methods to make various oil components/analogs.
but oil/gas are primarily used as an energy source, and making them uses more energy than you can get out.
if you use a different energy source (eg nuclear reactors) you can make synthetic fuels to use in vehicles (eg instead of batteries for cars).
but natural oil is cheaper for now so nobody does it besides a few prototype plants
We absolutely can. Problem is, even at a100% efficiency, we’d only get out the same energy that we put in.
Say it takes 50kw to make a gallon of synthetic gasoline. If you burned it to make power, at most you’d get 50kw out
about 3/4 of all oil is used as an energy source. cars, trucks, trains, ships, etc.
energy *source* is an important distinction. we spend energy getting it out of the ground and refining it, but we get *way* more energy from it. we are literally harvesting energy from the earth.
if we synthesize those same chemicals, that means all that energy came from us. we had to spend *another* energy source to put the energy in there to use. that would make oil a “store of energy” basically a battery. and if we’re just storing energy, we have better ways to do that. so synthetic oil as a fuel has a niche right now only because we have an oil fuel infrastructure already. if the need for fuel ever outstrips oil sources, we’ll just move away from oil altogether. it wouldn’t even be a choice, it’s all we *could* do.
synthetic oil as a source of plastics is something we *can* do, but it’s very expensive. plastic is currently cheap because plastic is basically a waste product of fuel production. oil would have to go away before it really made sense to synthesize plastic, and then plastic wouldn’t be the cheap disposable garbage it is now.
Can we make artificial gold? How would it be possible? Could you just bubble some Hydrogen through Mercury and hope that they somehow fuse?
You need a ton of gas for it to be worthwhile. A diamond though has value even if it’s the size of a pea.
Energy. To make oil and gas you need energy, MORE than they will give back when you burn them
We can but it’s still cheaper to just get oil out of the ground. Moreover, it’s more profitable to direct lab-made hydrocarbons to all the other users of oil products that aren’t fuel (perfumes and beauty products, pharmaceuticals, pesticides and herbicides, plastics and various other chemicals).
We use oil and gas as a source of energy. It’s free energy in the ground you just pump up and then set on fire.
In order to artifically make oil or gas, you need to put in energy somehow. Energy doesn’t just appear out of thin air. So that means electricity that you have to use to make the gas or oil. No process is 100% efficient so not only do you lose energy when you transform oil into electricity, you then lose energy again when you transform electricity into oil.
So you can’t just make oil and gas like that. You have to use another energy source, but if you already have energy, why make oil or gas?
Well, energy is difficult to store. Right now we are starting to have a lot of renewable energy which depend on outside factors like sun/wind. Once you have built a wind turbine any energy you gain is free, but you can’t always use it.
So if you have too much wind energy on a windy day in denmark or something, you could use some of that extra energy to make oil or gas. Right now it’s mostly looking into making hydrogen as a fuel source, because its very easy and efficient to do. But the step from hydrogen to natural gas(methane CH4) is not very big.
So making artificial oil and gas is actually something we are looking into, but mostly because it works as a way to store excess renewable energy.
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