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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People are giving lots of technical answers that are true but miss the point, I think. The real point is that diamonds are worth way more than oil or gas. A gallon of gas is about six pounds and retails for about $4. Six pounds of industrial grade diamond dust (like for saw blades) would be worth something like $60,000 based on prices I’m seeing online. And six pounds of jewelry grade diamonds would be worth millions at least.
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.
There is no scientific or technical reason why we can’t make everything that we currently make from oil from biological sources. We already make bio ethanol for fuel, on a large scale. The issue is cost, and energy requirements, oil is remarkably cheap and there is a huge amount of infrastructure around oil and gas processing.
To make the things we currently make from oil requires energy, that energy often does not come from green sources. Making the energy sector green is going to take time but the money and willpower are there. Most large countries are building green energy about as fast as they can. Give it 50 years and we will be in a place where your question is answered.
Oil would be tricky, considering we’re basically sucking up leftover dinosaur, plant & fish remains that have spent a super super long time there
You can synthesize hydrocarbons of course. Problem is, they are needed as energy sources, you are never going to get more out of it than you put in during the synthesis making the exercise rather pointless. It is an option for green chemical industry and such, but for fuels it makes no sense.
Assuming you are thinking of using it for its fuel purposes, thick of oil and gas as just a fancy battery. The stuff in the ground is just energy built up and stored millions of years ago by living things that died. So in a way you are digging up fully charged batteries mostly ready to use, just some converson required.
Making our own requires expending energy to “store” it, like you would charge a battery. This always requires more energy to do than you end up storing. So it really not that efficient and doesn’t make much sense over just using a battery.
We do already make synthetic versions of the byproducts of oil (plastics and the like) where it makes a little nore sense to.
#Volume!
Think about the amount of space all the diamonds in the world would take up?
Now think about the amount of space all the oil, gas, petrol, ect would take up. Oh and not just cars, but planes, boats and other vehicles!
It would be a gargantuan amount of space!
A mid size refinery is 300,000 barrels a day of refining capacity. Ask those labs how many barrels of diamonds they can fill up in a day.
Making a diamond is like making a sand castle with a bucket. All the grains align themselves and stick together because they are all the same, like the carbon atoms in a diamond.
Making oil is more like making a cake shaped like Ironman, because oil is made of a long chain of molecules made of atoms, all different and having to be fit together in a process that originally required a living organism to sequence it all before dying and stashing it underground.
We *could* probably but the problem is that we would be expending oil to make oil. Not literally but we would be consuming energy to make the thing to consume for energy.
It works out better that we consume the dense energy that millions of years have provided for us.
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