– Why can’t we just ‘produce’ gasoline, like synthetically?
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You can, but it’s utterly expensive and ineffective. Gasoline is nothing more than a storage for energy. When you burn it, this energy gets released.
However, to put that energy back into gasoline is not that simple: it’s like playing Jenga. Toppling the tower (and releasing the energy) is easy. Building the tower is hard, especially if you do it without the mold.
You can produce eFuels with wind or solar energy, but you would need 12-20 times more energy to produce eFuels compared to simply store it in any kind of rechargeable battery. Even recycling batteries after first use(*) (which can be done up to 98%, if it weren’t cheaper to simply mine for new minerals) is more energy efficient than producing eFuels.
(*) Almost all large rechargeable batteries have second use applications
The question is then why not use batteries all the way? Because oil is cheap. It’s incredibly cheap. You see the prices at the gas station and think oil is expensive – it isn’t. Oil companies make a fortune every second. Fossil fuels are exempted from taxes in most production processes (only you, the customer, has to pay taxes and you have to come up with almost all of them as you’re the only payer), so for production it’s even cheaper than most people expect. Hence the industry will never move away from it.
The energy stored in fossil fuels has been stored over millions of years. That’s way longer than humans have existed. We released all of that in a matter of two centuries. It’s not a good situation. We couldn’t exist in the conditions before..
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