– Why can’t we just ‘produce’ gasoline, like synthetically?
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As others mentioned, you can.
The problem is that it takes more energy to make a fuel than you can get out of it by burning it. Imagine that you had a box that all your Halloween candy went into each year. Your parents take a little bit of it each time you put new candy in as the “parent tax.” So you can never get back everything that you put in, but once it goes in the box it will stay there until you eat it. It wouldn’t make much sense to put candy in and then take it out right away, because your parents would just eat some of it and there was no reason to store it, right?
But what if your parents had their own box, and their parents did too, and their parents, and so on, and they all put their Halloween candy in it and paid the parent tax but never took all of it back out. Now your parents give you all the boxes of candy that were passed down through the family tree, all the way back to the very first one started by your great, great, great, great grandparents. It’s an enormous box, and it has a lifetime’s worth of candy.
You would have more candy than you could ever eat, so you wouldn’t worry too much about saving it, or adding more to the box. You might even come up with ways to make money by selling it to your friends, and you could sell it to them for much less than it costs to buy candy at the store because the people who paid the price for putting the candy in the box are long gone by now.
That’s what oil is like. The price was paid in something called entropy over millions of years by microorganisms in prehistoric oceans, and the energy stored in it came from the sun. If we wanted to make new oil, we’d have to pay the same price, but now it wouldn’t be paid over millions of years by someone else, it would be paid by us, right now, today. It would be like putting candy in the box, paying the tax, and taking it right back out. This is why people are happy to use oil up as fast as they can pull it out of the ground, and why it’s cheaper to dig miles into the earth and set up drilling rigs that cost hundreds of millions of dollars in the middle of the ocean to get at the oil than it is to make new oil. There is so much energy stored there that until we have a way to generate and store energy hundreds or thousands of times more quickly than we can today, it will still cost less to drill for it than it would to produce it synthetically. And if we can generate and store energy that fast, then the need for oil as energy storage in the first place disappears – we can just use the energy directly.
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