– Why can’t we just ‘produce’ gasoline, like synthetically?
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You can, but you’d get back less energy from burning the gasoline that it would require to synthesize it. If not, that would be a perpetual motion / free energy scenario, which is impossible by definition because it would violate thermodynamics.
Put another way: Even in an ideal case with a perfect waste-less synthesis, the amount of energy you’d get from burning the gasoline you make would be just the same amount of energy you had to input to make it. And in the real world where no process is 100% energy efficient, the best you could do is getting back slightly less energy from the gas than it required to synthesize.
So even if you’re going to say “well just use renewable power like solar as your power source to synthesize the gasoline” … again it’s impossible to get back even the same amount of energy you spend on the synthesis, so you’d be better off using that same solar energy to just power an electric car directly than to use it to go energy -> gasoline -> back-to-energy-at-a-loss and then use it to drive.
**TLDR: Chemically, it is 100% possible to synthesize gasoline. It’s just doesn’t make sense as a power source because you** ***must*** **spend more energy making the gasoline than you can possibly get back from burning it.** And it’s not like a “because we don’t know how” situation that could be solved by chemistry or engineering. It’s physically impossible.
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