– Why can’t we just ‘produce’ gasoline, like synthetically?
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You can. After the 1970s energy crisis New Zealand built a synthetic gasoline plant to improve its fuel security, supplied by a very large and recently developed offshore gas field.
But the process is quite inefficient (it’s very nergy intensive), so the end product was not competitive with conventional fuel (or just using the methane feedstock in non-automotive applications) . The plant was eventually converted to make industrial methanol.
If you really want to use methane to fuel cars today, it’s much more efficient (ie cheaper) to generate power with it, and use that to charge electric vehicles.
You can also do the same with CO2 and water, but that’s even more energy intensive, so mostly a curiosity at present unless you have something with a lot of non-carbon energy (most likely solar or nuclear), far away from normal supply routes, and a very pressing need for lots of fuel – so the most immediate applications are things like expeditionary tank battalions and carrier air wings (no surprise then the US military is strongly supporting this research ).
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