– Why can’t we just ‘produce’ gasoline, like synthetically?
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The answers to these questions are almost always: we can, but it takes more energy than we get, or at least… costs more money and energy than we can justify.
We can do a lot, but not cheaper and easier.
We can. If we needed to, we would probably synthesize a better chemical than gasoline. The problem is, gasoline from oil is a net energy gain while synthesizing gasoline is a net energy loss.
It doesn’t take much energy to drill a well and then you get hundreds of millions of barrels of crude oil and it doesnt take a lot of energy to process and transport hundreds of millions of gallons of gasoline, kerosene, fuel oil, propane, butane, methane, jet fuel, diesel, etc to market.
If you want to synthesize gasoline you need to start with carbon, hydrogen, and a few other atoms. The most convenient place to get these chemicals is in giant giant poola hundreds of feet under the ground. Oddly enough, they’re often strung together into hydrocarbons that are pretty easily distilled into….gasoline, kerosene, fuel oil, propane, butane, methane, jet fuel, diesel, etc…
If you want to try gathering those elements from the atmosphere or separate water, that requires a LOT of energy and is kind of a general pain in the ass. Then you need to input energy into the synthesizer to make the atoms into gasoline.
By the time you have gasoline you get less energy from burning it than you spent making it. You would have been better off using that energy for doing whatever you needed to do in the first place. Unless you specifically need something that goes boom.
gasoline is a chemical battery that comes out as heat instead of as electricity.
remember the respirations<->photosynthesis reaction IS the combustion reaction that gas uses – [carbohydrate] + O2 <-> H2O+CO2+energy – every single photosynthetic plant is synthesising carbohydrates – and gasoline is in fact a carbohydrate.
We can grow fields of crabgrass or algae in deserts, and then press them, and use that as fuel – that’s how you make BIOdiesel. You can also just do the same thing as photosynthesis chemically; use solar energy to power carbon fixation machines that produce whatever type of gas you want to make.
we don’t do that, not because we don’t know HOW, but because doing it is more expensive than digging new gas out of the ground: the national average for biodiesel is 5.50/gallon (despite being subsidized), regular gas is $3.50-$4/gallon, and synth gas is up at $15-20/gallon – prohibitively expensive. It’s simply cheaper to store energy in batteries or in hydrogen (for hydrogen fuel cells) than it is to store it in gasoline
we use gasoline because it’s an available and highly dense energy source, not because it’s the most efficient way to store NEW energy, so once we start running out of gas we aren’t going to dedicate too much into making more simply because there are cheaper ways to store energy than a complex, hard to create hydrocarbon.
The answers to these questions are almost always: we can, but it takes more energy than we get, or at least… costs more money and energy than we can justify.
We can do a lot, but not cheaper and easier.
The answers to these questions are almost always: we can, but it takes more energy than we get, or at least… costs more money and energy than we can justify.
We can do a lot, but not cheaper and easier.
You can, but there’s a trade off to it.
We (as a civilization) like fossil fuels because the energy we put in is muchless than the energy we get out of them, but any time we create synthetic fuels we lose energy along the way.
There’s energy loss for gasoline as well, mostly in refining and logistically transporting it, but on the whole it’s relatively cheap for what we get out of it.
If you want another reason to curb our use of fossil fuels: in the event of societal collapse it would be really handy for anyone left behind to have easy access to some amount of fossil fuels to jump start things again, as the more green options require way more investment than a developing civilization can manage.
You can, but there’s a trade off to it.
We (as a civilization) like fossil fuels because the energy we put in is muchless than the energy we get out of them, but any time we create synthetic fuels we lose energy along the way.
There’s energy loss for gasoline as well, mostly in refining and logistically transporting it, but on the whole it’s relatively cheap for what we get out of it.
If you want another reason to curb our use of fossil fuels: in the event of societal collapse it would be really handy for anyone left behind to have easy access to some amount of fossil fuels to jump start things again, as the more green options require way more investment than a developing civilization can manage.
You can, but there’s a trade off to it.
We (as a civilization) like fossil fuels because the energy we put in is muchless than the energy we get out of them, but any time we create synthetic fuels we lose energy along the way.
There’s energy loss for gasoline as well, mostly in refining and logistically transporting it, but on the whole it’s relatively cheap for what we get out of it.
If you want another reason to curb our use of fossil fuels: in the event of societal collapse it would be really handy for anyone left behind to have easy access to some amount of fossil fuels to jump start things again, as the more green options require way more investment than a developing civilization can manage.
We can but it is a bit self defeating. The point of gasoline is that it takes little energy to get a lot of energy out of it. Synthetic gasoline is the exact opposite, a lot of energy in to get less energy out. Just because something can be dobe doesn’t mean it is worth doing.
We can but it is a bit self defeating. The point of gasoline is that it takes little energy to get a lot of energy out of it. Synthetic gasoline is the exact opposite, a lot of energy in to get less energy out. Just because something can be dobe doesn’t mean it is worth doing.
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