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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To put it simply, we technically could, but the price and energy is too high, so it’s more economical to get it out of the ground.
Diamonds, on the other hand, are much more difficult and expensive to mine, so growing them in a lab makes sense.
We do. It’s called biodiesel. Usually made from soy or vegetable oil that’s need me to go through chemical processing to make it suitable for engine combustion.
Making lab diamonds is pretty expensive but the product is also expensive so its profitable. Using the same process to create the same volume of oil just isn’t worth it.
What kind of thought process is this?
Oil and gas have a high energy density and you get more energy from them than what it takes to get them out of the ground, if you were to produce oil and gas you’d need to expend more energy than you’d get out.
Diamonds on the other hand are expensive only since people agreed they have value as they elevate your social status, other than that they’re not much more useful than a metal file that you have to sift through hundreds of thousands tons of material to get to.
There’s up to 10% ethanol in fuel in this country. That is basically alcohol made from corn (aka grown in a lab). Technically, we do.
We can make synthetic natural gas (I know the name is weird) at scale, and generally economically, it’s still cheaper to pump it and process what’s already here, though. Bad coal and bipwaste are primary sources.
Oil is harder. Currently, it takes more energy than you get out of it to do, iirc.
Oil and gas come out of the ground packed full of energy. Manufactured oil and gas have to have energy put into them during manufacturing, so it has to come from somewhere else. So if we need a source of energy for our cars or houses, it makes more sense to use the existing, prepacked sources, ie. fossil fuels straight from the earth, than use some other source of energy to synthesize oil and gas and use that.
Sometimes it makes sense to convert energy from one kind to another, for example to transport it to where it is needed, but a lot of the time it makes more sense to use what you already have.
Well, we are using fossil fuels that were formed over hundreds of millions of years in a few centuries. It is unsustainable, but very profitable in terms of energy invested vs. energy returned, because we didn’t pay for the formation of the oil — it is already there, as result of natural processes. We only pay the extraction cost.
As far as I know, there doesn’t really exist a process that could e.g. convert sunlight to oil at suitable scale and cost. At the very least, as much energy would need to be spent on making the oil than is eventually recovered from burning it, so the primary source would have to be sunlight, and it would probably have to be something like algae growing on sea over vast areas, then collected together and somehow converted to oil.
The situation with fossil fuels is akin to living off large inheritance vs. earning the money you plan to spend tomorrow today. In the former, all you have to do is maybe phone someone once in a while to wire you more money you can use, but the latter is real work that must be done to make every bit of money you plan to spend tomorrow during today. Nature gives no loans nor windfall.
We were the party generation, living off this massive inheritance bestowed to us by nature. Future generations will have to pay for everything themselves, and also pay for the carbon dioxide cleanup, if it is even possible, and they will envy and hate us for what we have done. I am sorry, future generations of man.
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