We know that oil is formed from prehistoric plants being converted to oil under pressure in the earth’s crust. Is this process still happening, but we’re not able to access new sources due to using current resources too quickly, or is there only a finite amount and we’re going to run out entirely one day?
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Yes, plants make oils, some of this is turned into HVO and BioDiesel and used directly, bypassing the fossilisation phase. The problem is efficiency, a PV panel is typically 20% efficient, for 100W of sunlight you get 20W of usable energy. Photosynthesis is 5% efficient and only a small portion of that goes to making fats and oils and further energy is required to extract the oil, process it for use and transport it to the point of use. In addition biofuels compete for space with food production.
Synthetic alternatives are possible, blue crude, however compared to electricity transmission and battery or pumped hydroelectric storage it’s really inefficient so will only be necessary where electrification is not feasible.
Round trip efficiency is much lower for synthetic fuel ~21% for methanol or diesel, 30% for Hydrogen fuels than the ~80% figure for batteries.
So yes it is possible but uses 4x as much energy as battery storage so probably isn’t worth doing at scale compared to building batteries.
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