– Why can’t we just ‘produce’ gasoline, like synthetically?
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gasoline is a chemical battery that comes out as heat instead of as electricity.
remember the respirations<->photosynthesis reaction IS the combustion reaction that gas uses – [carbohydrate] + O2 <-> H2O+CO2+energy – every single photosynthetic plant is synthesising carbohydrates – and gasoline is in fact a carbohydrate.
We can grow fields of crabgrass or algae in deserts, and then press them, and use that as fuel – that’s how you make BIOdiesel. You can also just do the same thing as photosynthesis chemically; use solar energy to power carbon fixation machines that produce whatever type of gas you want to make.
we don’t do that, not because we don’t know HOW, but because doing it is more expensive than digging new gas out of the ground: the national average for biodiesel is 5.50/gallon (despite being subsidized), regular gas is $3.50-$4/gallon, and synth gas is up at $15-20/gallon – prohibitively expensive. It’s simply cheaper to store energy in batteries or in hydrogen (for hydrogen fuel cells) than it is to store it in gasoline
we use gasoline because it’s an available and highly dense energy source, not because it’s the most efficient way to store NEW energy, so once we start running out of gas we aren’t going to dedicate too much into making more simply because there are cheaper ways to store energy than a complex, hard to create hydrocarbon.
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