– Why can’t we just ‘produce’ gasoline, like synthetically?
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Lots of really great answers here explaining “you can”, and that’s true. The ELI5 follow up to those excellent answers is:
Photosynthetic organisms did a great job of solar energy capture in times long past and the resultant crude oil is an astoundingly good repository of that energy capture. So much so that any direct synthesis of gasoline not relying on chemical energy already stored is going to look pretty bad/inefficient (and hence hugely costly).
Synthetic jet fuel (SAF) is being used in some aircraft today. It’s expensive (about $1.1 per liter compared to jet fuels’s $0.5 per liter) but it comes from sequestration of CO2, so it’s a carbon cycle that consumes and releases CO2 in roughly the same amounts. Although it displaces CO2 from the surface, where the fuel is created, to the atmosphere, where it affects weather/climate, it’s considered a good first step.
BTW, the next step is electric planes, which is coming, although slowly… hydrogen cells are lighter than batteries for long-haul transports, like for air and sea. We already have small planes that use batteries, today.
Lots of really great answers here explaining “you can”, and that’s true. The ELI5 follow up to those excellent answers is:
Photosynthetic organisms did a great job of solar energy capture in times long past and the resultant crude oil is an astoundingly good repository of that energy capture. So much so that any direct synthesis of gasoline not relying on chemical energy already stored is going to look pretty bad/inefficient (and hence hugely costly).
Synthetic jet fuel (SAF) is being used in some aircraft today. It’s expensive (about $1.1 per liter compared to jet fuels’s $0.5 per liter) but it comes from sequestration of CO2, so it’s a carbon cycle that consumes and releases CO2 in roughly the same amounts. Although it displaces CO2 from the surface, where the fuel is created, to the atmosphere, where it affects weather/climate, it’s considered a good first step.
BTW, the next step is electric planes, which is coming, although slowly… hydrogen cells are lighter than batteries for long-haul transports, like for air and sea. We already have small planes that use batteries, today.
As others mentioned, you can.
The problem is that it takes more energy to make a fuel than you can get out of it by burning it. Imagine that you had a box that all your Halloween candy went into each year. Your parents take a little bit of it each time you put new candy in as the “parent tax.” So you can never get back everything that you put in, but once it goes in the box it will stay there until you eat it. It wouldn’t make much sense to put candy in and then take it out right away, because your parents would just eat some of it and there was no reason to store it, right?
But what if your parents had their own box, and their parents did too, and their parents, and so on, and they all put their Halloween candy in it and paid the parent tax but never took all of it back out. Now your parents give you all the boxes of candy that were passed down through the family tree, all the way back to the very first one started by your great, great, great, great grandparents. It’s an enormous box, and it has a lifetime’s worth of candy.
You would have more candy than you could ever eat, so you wouldn’t worry too much about saving it, or adding more to the box. You might even come up with ways to make money by selling it to your friends, and you could sell it to them for much less than it costs to buy candy at the store because the people who paid the price for putting the candy in the box are long gone by now.
That’s what oil is like. The price was paid in something called entropy over millions of years by microorganisms in prehistoric oceans, and the energy stored in it came from the sun. If we wanted to make new oil, we’d have to pay the same price, but now it wouldn’t be paid over millions of years by someone else, it would be paid by us, right now, today. It would be like putting candy in the box, paying the tax, and taking it right back out. This is why people are happy to use oil up as fast as they can pull it out of the ground, and why it’s cheaper to dig miles into the earth and set up drilling rigs that cost hundreds of millions of dollars in the middle of the ocean to get at the oil than it is to make new oil. There is so much energy stored there that until we have a way to generate and store energy hundreds or thousands of times more quickly than we can today, it will still cost less to drill for it than it would to produce it synthetically. And if we can generate and store energy that fast, then the need for oil as energy storage in the first place disappears – we can just use the energy directly.
Lots of really great answers here explaining “you can”, and that’s true. The ELI5 follow up to those excellent answers is:
Photosynthetic organisms did a great job of solar energy capture in times long past and the resultant crude oil is an astoundingly good repository of that energy capture. So much so that any direct synthesis of gasoline not relying on chemical energy already stored is going to look pretty bad/inefficient (and hence hugely costly).
As others mentioned, you can.
The problem is that it takes more energy to make a fuel than you can get out of it by burning it. Imagine that you had a box that all your Halloween candy went into each year. Your parents take a little bit of it each time you put new candy in as the “parent tax.” So you can never get back everything that you put in, but once it goes in the box it will stay there until you eat it. It wouldn’t make much sense to put candy in and then take it out right away, because your parents would just eat some of it and there was no reason to store it, right?
But what if your parents had their own box, and their parents did too, and their parents, and so on, and they all put their Halloween candy in it and paid the parent tax but never took all of it back out. Now your parents give you all the boxes of candy that were passed down through the family tree, all the way back to the very first one started by your great, great, great, great grandparents. It’s an enormous box, and it has a lifetime’s worth of candy.
You would have more candy than you could ever eat, so you wouldn’t worry too much about saving it, or adding more to the box. You might even come up with ways to make money by selling it to your friends, and you could sell it to them for much less than it costs to buy candy at the store because the people who paid the price for putting the candy in the box are long gone by now.
That’s what oil is like. The price was paid in something called entropy over millions of years by microorganisms in prehistoric oceans, and the energy stored in it came from the sun. If we wanted to make new oil, we’d have to pay the same price, but now it wouldn’t be paid over millions of years by someone else, it would be paid by us, right now, today. It would be like putting candy in the box, paying the tax, and taking it right back out. This is why people are happy to use oil up as fast as they can pull it out of the ground, and why it’s cheaper to dig miles into the earth and set up drilling rigs that cost hundreds of millions of dollars in the middle of the ocean to get at the oil than it is to make new oil. There is so much energy stored there that until we have a way to generate and store energy hundreds or thousands of times more quickly than we can today, it will still cost less to drill for it than it would to produce it synthetically. And if we can generate and store energy that fast, then the need for oil as energy storage in the first place disappears – we can just use the energy directly.
You can do this but the cost of it would be too high compared to an Oil country KSA who literally just pumps it up from the ground. This is why Canada’s oil sands cannot compete. KSA just drops the price to where Canadian producers are losing too much to make it worth the effort.
As others mentioned, you can.
The problem is that it takes more energy to make a fuel than you can get out of it by burning it. Imagine that you had a box that all your Halloween candy went into each year. Your parents take a little bit of it each time you put new candy in as the “parent tax.” So you can never get back everything that you put in, but once it goes in the box it will stay there until you eat it. It wouldn’t make much sense to put candy in and then take it out right away, because your parents would just eat some of it and there was no reason to store it, right?
But what if your parents had their own box, and their parents did too, and their parents, and so on, and they all put their Halloween candy in it and paid the parent tax but never took all of it back out. Now your parents give you all the boxes of candy that were passed down through the family tree, all the way back to the very first one started by your great, great, great, great grandparents. It’s an enormous box, and it has a lifetime’s worth of candy.
You would have more candy than you could ever eat, so you wouldn’t worry too much about saving it, or adding more to the box. You might even come up with ways to make money by selling it to your friends, and you could sell it to them for much less than it costs to buy candy at the store because the people who paid the price for putting the candy in the box are long gone by now.
That’s what oil is like. The price was paid in something called entropy over millions of years by microorganisms in prehistoric oceans, and the energy stored in it came from the sun. If we wanted to make new oil, we’d have to pay the same price, but now it wouldn’t be paid over millions of years by someone else, it would be paid by us, right now, today. It would be like putting candy in the box, paying the tax, and taking it right back out. This is why people are happy to use oil up as fast as they can pull it out of the ground, and why it’s cheaper to dig miles into the earth and set up drilling rigs that cost hundreds of millions of dollars in the middle of the ocean to get at the oil than it is to make new oil. There is so much energy stored there that until we have a way to generate and store energy hundreds or thousands of times more quickly than we can today, it will still cost less to drill for it than it would to produce it synthetically. And if we can generate and store energy that fast, then the need for oil as energy storage in the first place disappears – we can just use the energy directly.
You can do this but the cost of it would be too high compared to an Oil country KSA who literally just pumps it up from the ground. This is why Canada’s oil sands cannot compete. KSA just drops the price to where Canadian producers are losing too much to make it worth the effort.
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