Is there any kind of process that will allow you to make a food fit for human consumption with the kind of oil you get from an oil well?
If you’re in no rush, you could burn it to provide light and carbon dioxide in a greenhouse where you’re growing crops. But there are probably more direct methods.
Probably. Hydrocarbons and carbohydrates are not entirely unlike each other. But probably the energy input required would be so great as to not make it worthwhile. Where’s our organic chemists?
Like refining it into diesel fuel for powering farm equipment!
Mmmmm…dinosaur soup.
Seems theoretically possible to change hydrocarbons into carbohydrates… Both are just a bunch of carbon and hydrogen atoms strung together. Carbohydrates are not food, though… You would basically just be eating pure sugar, and all the other nutrients your body requires would have to come from elsewhere.
So i’d say the answer is no, you can’t turn oil into food directly… too much that makes food food is missing.
The inventor of petroleum jelly, Robert Chesebrough, ate a spoonful of it a day and lived to be 101. However, I don’t know if it has any nutritional value.
Food fit from human consumption, yes. It would be mainly carbs and fats, tho, as has already been mentioned; all the oil is missing for them is oxygen and that’s readily available.
Food that would fulfill a human’s dietary needs, no. You could make proteins (although the cost of reagents and catalysts starts getting astronomic), you could make vitamins, but forget about minerals.
And you’d need reagents, catalysts, energy, etc. There’s a reason we use glucose and other vegetable-produced carbs as a source for any sugar-like substance needed by an organic chemist: plants do it better.
Aren’t some ersatz foods like pseudo cheese made from coal tar by products? How different from petroleum is coal tar?
Rob
Distilled white vinegar can be made from petroleum feedstock rather than botanical sources.
There is no labeling requirement for this practice in the US, so if the vinegar you buy isn’t a brand (such as Heinz, for one) which specifically claims otherwise, what you’re getting is probably petroleum-derived.
Yes. I’ve mentioned it on this board before, it’s called single cell protein
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=483043&highlight=single+cell+protein
well, i think you can turn food into petroleum if you wait around long enough.
i turn food into something else every day… it takes a little over 12 hrs.