– 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.
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.
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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Am chemical engineer in petrochemical business:
We can do this and research into this actually ongoing to scale it up. By using green hydrogen from wind and solar farms, combined with co2 from a technology called direct air capture we can create long carbon chains via the Fisher-Tropsch process.
This can be entirely green but is currently still in development to become feasible. Moreover, the required energy is far higher than the output making it economically infeasible at this time. Basically we would need an abundance of sustainable energy.
The main benefit to doing this is the fact that you can create a high energy density liquid that is already widely used in automotive, naval, and, most importantly, aviation while being carbon neutral.
Am chemical engineer in petrochemical business:
We can do this and research into this actually ongoing to scale it up. By using green hydrogen from wind and solar farms, combined with co2 from a technology called direct air capture we can create long carbon chains via the Fisher-Tropsch process.
This can be entirely green but is currently still in development to become feasible. Moreover, the required energy is far higher than the output making it economically infeasible at this time. Basically we would need an abundance of sustainable energy.
The main benefit to doing this is the fact that you can create a high energy density liquid that is already widely used in automotive, naval, and, most importantly, aviation while being carbon neutral.
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.
Am chemical engineer in petrochemical business:
We can do this and research into this actually ongoing to scale it up. By using green hydrogen from wind and solar farms, combined with co2 from a technology called direct air capture we can create long carbon chains via the Fisher-Tropsch process.
This can be entirely green but is currently still in development to become feasible. Moreover, the required energy is far higher than the output making it economically infeasible at this time. Basically we would need an abundance of sustainable energy.
The main benefit to doing this is the fact that you can create a high energy density liquid that is already widely used in automotive, naval, and, most importantly, aviation while being carbon neutral.
Remember that fuels are just stored energy. It must have been put in there first. In the case of petrol, organic matter from plants and such have produced burnable matter through photosynthesis. Essentially it’s stored solar power (that sounds cleaner and more efficient than it is lol.. but that is the principle).
More specifically: Endothermic chemical reactions are reactions that require energy to turn A into B. Photosynthesis is endothermic. It turns CO2 and water into organic matter with the help of solar energy. Turning B back into A is always exothermic: it releases energy when that reaction takes place. That’s what fuel does when ignited.
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