– Why can’t we just ‘produce’ gasoline, like synthetically?
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You can. Close to the end of WWII the Nazis tried to use synfuels to keep their war effort going. The allies had pretty effectively blocked them off from oil fields and refining capacity by then. So they were pretty desperate. I don’t think it ever really made a big difference but they put some research money toward it at least.
The way you do it is called the Fischer-Tropsch process, though there might be others. The hard part right now is that you need a source of hydrogen gas. Our current method to get hydrogen uses natural gas and is called steam reforming. Which means you’re adding CO2 to the atmosphere and kind of defeats the purpose. It’s possible that we could get a lot better at electrolysing water to make the hydrogen. Then so long as the power for splitting the water is renewables, CO2 comes from either bioenergy or direct air capture, and heat for driving the synfuel process comes from renewables the process becomes a way to store renewable energy. It would be carbon neutral since it takes CO2 from the air and puts it back when it’s burned. We aren’t close to this being an economically viable thing right now as far as I know however.
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