– Why can’t we just ‘produce’ gasoline, like synthetically?
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We actually can. There was a lot of development of this in central Europe in the early 40s when the political situation made it difficult to transport oil into the area and there was a huge demand for gasoline and other oils made from coal and coal gas. The problem you are facing though is that you need to make the gasoline from something.
The easiest to start with is methane and hydrogen. This was made from coal but is also the same as natural gas. But you then need to get the methane to bind to each other to form longer chains of hydrocarbons. And this requires energy. So you end up spending a lot of energy and natural gas to make gasoline. That kind of defeats most of the reasons why you wanted gasoline in the first place.
It is great if you need fuel oil as a compact and easily transportable energy storage. But even back in the 40s a better option was to run trains and even cars on coal when possible. And today we have lots of engines that can run directly on natural gas so there is no need to convert it to gasoline first. And of course we are running a lot of things directly on electric power instead of using the electricity to make gasoline.
If you go a step further and want to produce the natural gas as well you face the same type of issue. Yes, it is possible to make natural gas from carbon dioxide and water, but this process requires a lot of energy. We probably need to do it for some things that require natural gas in the future but most things are better off just running directly on the electric power. Or one solution which is being looked at is to make hydrogen from water which makes a relatively easy way to transport the energy to where it is needed. Or to take it one step further and make ammonia from it which behaves very similar to natural gas. So we could run existing natural gas ships and busses on ammonia. You lose a lot less energy when doing this compared to when you make methane.
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