How about a remake of Soylent Green, bringing a new meaning to the term “people power”?
[Charlton Heston] "Shell Super Duper Plus is People!!! [/Charlton Heston]
Hey, if technology can make us appear to have placed men on the Moon and enabled a completely airtight conspiracy involving tens of thousands of people, then surely we can convert a little water and some charcoal into gasoline. All you really need, see, is this tiny daemon which runs around linking together the carbons into a chain which is covered in hydrogen. Breaking the covalent bonds between the oxygen and hydrogen is easy; you just bring your hydrocarbon chain nearby and wait until the hydrogen bond transitively exceeds the covalent bond, then give it a little kick to break it loose. The only problem is then what to do with the unbound oxygen; two daemons working together can solve this by sticking the oxygens together, but daemons typically don’t cooperate very well.
You just have to take the right approach, see. You might say I “have” a live cat in the box, but I can claim with equal certainty that it is dead. Until we open up the box and check it out, I can’t be said to have the live cat, only the possibility of having it.
Hey, it still makes more sense than transubstantiation and the ravings of Frank Tippler on cosmic teleology.
Stranger
Ah, the lesser-known Schroedinger’s Gas.
A schoolmate of mine had a Citroen that had no gas gauge (or it had been ripped out). It was also designed without a dipstick to measure gas level, and a gas tank that was only slightly larger than a cordial glass. We used to joke about the the indeterminacy about when he would arrive based upon having to refuel the car en route from the gas can carried in the trunk.
Stranger
I can convert your gasoline into water. You don’t even have to send it to me - just send the equivalent value by PayPal. I’ll tell you where to find the water on receipt of payment.
What if it was a really big pill with gasoline inside.
That’s called a gas tank.
People really don’t understand the concept of “liquids”, I guess. They think that since water is a liquid, every other liquid substance must be water with some stuff mixed in. Like, milk is water with a little protein and calcium and lactose mixed in. You can take a pill, mix it with water, and end up with milk, right? So why can’t you do the same with gasoline?
The trouble my young lightstorm–in case you’re actually still reading–is that gasoline isn’t composed of water + something else. It’s all gasoline, with no water. If you had a pill that could be mixed with water to run a car, why would you mix the pill with water…why not just burn the pill in the first place?
And of course we can synthesize gasoline or diesel fuel, the multiple processes to do this are well know. Tt’s just that it costs more to synthesize gasoline than it does to refine gasoline out of crude oil, even with gasoline at $4.00/gallon.
I believe it also has to do with the fact that it still takes energy and creates harmful emissions. Sure, it’s less harmful than gasoline, but it’s not zero-harmful.
So you take a high cost (always the primary factor) and add in that it’s still somewhat harmful.
After which the indeterminancy principle was developed to show that one cannot conclusively prove that the one who smelt it is the one that dealt it.
You guys are making this over complicated. You just take part of the water, break it down to a subatomic level and then use the subatomic particles to make carbon atoms. Then you break down the rest of the water to hydrogen and oxygen and synthesis hydrocarbon chains from that.
See, simple.
If you’re playing with nuclei, why not make plutonium instead? An nuclear reactor in your car should give you really good mileage! 
Sheesh, next you’re going to tell me just because they’re both solids I can’t use a simple alchemical process to convert base metals into pure gold. Or that this Carmot, Orichalcum, Mithril, and Adamantium I got off eBay are all fake.
Anyway, I heard that the pill guy was killed off by a group called Illuminati and the Tri-Lateral Commission during their collaboration with the Bush Administration to orchestrate 9/11. He was on the flight that was flown to Area 51 and had a hologram of itself projected around a missile that hit the Pentagon. He was obviously shot to cover this fact up, the fact he was the maker of the gas pill was unintentional, though his flight time was inexplicably changed the day before… You should really look in on these guys, apparently they may be dimension-hopping humanoid reptiles from outer space that control our governments, so maybe it wasn’t a team up at all. And of course they have the gas pill, and they just want to keep humanity in a perpetual state of lower technology for their amusement.
[sup]Too much?[/sup]
[golf clap] Excellent! [/golf clap]
I know there is a lot of sarcasm in this thread and that is all very understandable, but probably you should all be waiting for an actuall chemist to come in and answer the question.
Believe it or not the OP is entirely correct. We chemists can actually create chemicals from almost anything. A pill that you add to water to make gasoline is pretty elementary. Powdered n-octyllithium will produce the best gasoline you could ever want by adding it to water and I have no doubt it could be made into pill form. It’s really quite a simple acid base reaction that even an undergrad could think of. Is that a helecopter I hear? Who could be at my door at this time on the saturday. Oh my God! It’s the oil companies! They are trying to keep the secret. Tell my wife I love her! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!