– Why can’t we just ‘produce’ gasoline, like synthetically?
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We can produce bio-diesel, but the issue is emissions….if we can take the politics out of this debate there ARE solutions yet people do not want to accept certain truths (I actually wrote a book on this when working with Telsa. We proved that gas & diesel were actually CLEANER than EV after you factor in envoronmental factors of mining for the minerals and and and….but reddit hates the subject).
The thing that makes petroleum valuable as a fuel is that hydrocarbons are convenient packages for the energy that was required to forge their chemical bonds. The huge expenses of resources and energy that are involved in drilling, extracting, and refining petroleum are more than offset by being able to easily release millions of years worth of chemistry, heat, and pressure.
We could try to manufacture petroleum in a lab, but then all we’re doing is spending more energy to store some energy to burn later, and there’s no real advantage to anybody in doing that.
The thing that makes petroleum valuable as a fuel is that hydrocarbons are convenient packages for the energy that was required to forge their chemical bonds. The huge expenses of resources and energy that are involved in drilling, extracting, and refining petroleum are more than offset by being able to easily release millions of years worth of chemistry, heat, and pressure.
We could try to manufacture petroleum in a lab, but then all we’re doing is spending more energy to store some energy to burn later, and there’s no real advantage to anybody in doing that.
We can, and you can even use carbon-capture to pull CO2 out of the air and (after a kajillion steps) use that carbon to assemble the gasoline.
The bad news is all those steps cost energy, so doing this is like picking up a hundred pennies and then spending 75 bucks to transform the pennies into a $5 bill. (I made up those numbers, but you get the idea; it’s really inefficient and not worth it in most cases.)
Could it EVER be worth it? Well, if you’re in a remote location and your life depends on a gasoline-powered machine, sure. There will probably always be cases where hydrocarbon fuels’ ease of use and energy density make them the best thing for the job. But on a national scale, synthetic hydrocarbons wouldn’t be a great investment.
Would it be possible in the future to grow at massive scale genetically modified plants that produce some kind of carbohydrates that can be easily refined and used as fuel? Fuel melons?
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.
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.
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.
The thing that makes petroleum valuable as a fuel is that hydrocarbons are convenient packages for the energy that was required to forge their chemical bonds. The huge expenses of resources and energy that are involved in drilling, extracting, and refining petroleum are more than offset by being able to easily release millions of years worth of chemistry, heat, and pressure.
We could try to manufacture petroleum in a lab, but then all we’re doing is spending more energy to store some energy to burn later, and there’s no real advantage to anybody in doing that.
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