Naïve question, I know, but take it at face value. Perhaps I should have asked “why does oil take so long to form?” This is kind of like asking “why can’t we invent a perpetual motion machine.” I’m not suggesting we can, but if I wasn’t aware of the laws of thermodynamics, a basic explanation would be the answer.
Anyway, I have vague memories of studying the oil and gas window in earth sciences classes. IIRC, raw materials get covered over time, compressed to some ridiculous degree, which generates absurd amounts of heat, until finally the petroleum fairy visits organic molecules turning them into magic car juice.
Absurd amounts of pressure? Isn’t that a matter of leverage and containment? Is material sciences just not capable engineering parts that will hold up under such conditions? What about the manufacturing of synthetic diamonds – doesn’t that require similar compression? (Or did that Superman movie get it wrong?)
Absurd amounts of heat? Would it take more energy to generate the heat than energy you’d get out? But wouldn’t most of the heat come from increased pressure?
Time? Why does it take so long to convert materials? What’s going on at the physical level?
Economies of scale? Is it theoretically possible, but ridiculously expensive per drop?
I don’t know for certain but I would speculate that the amount of energy required to make synthetic oil would exceed the amount of energy that could be extracted out of it. (Synthetic oil like Mobil 1 is not intended to burn for energy but to use as a lubricant.)
Natural oil, OTOH, allows us to extract energy that was originally provided by the sun over a long period of time.
There are numerous processes for making synthetic oil. There’s a good chance you have synthetic motor oil in your car.
For fuel, it’s simply not efficient. The energy cost of producing synthetic oil is far greater than what you’d get out of it. The cost of drilling and transporting the real stuff is significantly less.
Take this question in a different direction, suggested by the reference in the OP of “magic car juice”.
Can we synthesize gasoline?
In thinking it through, I realize I’m missing tons of detail. But I’m looking at it like this:
a) Gasoline is, essentially, a mix of various chemical compounds (hydrocarbons, to be exact).
b) Some chemical compounds can be manufactured simply by combining the right proportions of the right chemicals together.
c) Other chemical compunds may need – in addition to the right proportions of the right chemicals – heat, light, or a catalyst of some kind.
d) Carbon forms bonds with other elements readily (too readily?)
OK. So we’ve got a mess of elemental hydrgogen and carbon, and we’re ready to whip up some custom hydrocarbons in the appropriate quantities, and then combine those hydrocarbons into engine-ready gasoline. What’s our show-stopper here? Where do we get technologically stymied?
We can do it. It just takes a crap load of energy to do so. Think of how long your engine can run on 1 gallon of gas. In order to make that gallon of gas, you’d need to run an engine the equivalent amount, plus more to make up for inefficiency.
What does that “crap load of energy” go into? What does that energy “do” to the hydrogen & carbon that the H & C won’t do spontaneously on their own?
Let me ask a ridiculously simple question for the sake of enlightenment. Your post makes sense mathematically, but is hard to grok from a common-sense angle. Please forgive me:
I grab a pinch of carbon and a “handful” of hydrogen, and throw them into a sealed container. Presumably, I have used no more energy than is required to add sugar to a cup of coffee.
Will useful hydrocarbons spontaneously form? If not, what’s needed? Heat?
Where do you get that pinch of carbon or hydrogen? They don’t exist freely. You can take CO2 and knock off the O2 to make some sort of larger molecule, but that takes energy. Same with generating any amount of elemental hydrogen – it’s usually done by either taking it off of a hydrocarbon or water, both of which again require large energy inputs.
Given that Energy = mass x crapload[sup]2[/sup], might there be some way of using nuclear energy to produce something we can burn in our internal combustion engines?
Add some pressure, some heat and a catalyst and you just may get hydrocarbons. Of course that hydrogen probably came from natural gas anyway so your working backwards.
The problem is that we need a feedstock to create the CO used in the process, and the cheapest source for this is coal and the coal also provides the energy to run the process. This is good because the US has gigantic reserves of coal. Unfortuneately, this means lots more coal mining, and coal dumps CO2 and Sulphur into the atmosphere. Not so hot when we’re trying to curtail greenhouse gases and acid rain and strip mining and so on.
The only problem is that liquid fuels produced this way are pretty expensive, and we’d have to build a lot of expensive new infrastructure for it. Conventional gasoline at $4.00/gallon is still cheaper than synthetic fuels. But this does create a cap for the potential price of gasoline, because at some point like $10/gallon this could be cheaper. So apocalyptic predictions of $100/gallon gasoline are fantasies, because there are literally hundreds of cheaper alternatives to $100/gallon gas. But even at $4/gallon gasoline is still cheaper than the alternatives.
Hasn’t computational Biology made some leaps in this field? I don’t have a cite, but I recall reading about a Bio tech company that created some microbes that actually excreted crude oil.
I believe they are working on the problem of getting these little critters to work over large areas in order to produce usable quantities of the stuff. I also recall one ot he scientists saying that the process was carbon neutral.
Where do you get the carbon? Where do you get the hydrogen?
It’s not like we have giant piles of pure carbon lying around, or giant piles of pure hydrogen. Well, we do have giant piles of carbon but that carbon is underground and we have to go so some effort to dig it up. And hydrogen isn’t free either, the easiest sources of hydrogen are either electrolyzing water (which requires electricity) or natural gas. Of course, if you’ve got the natural gas you could just burn that, there are plenty of vehicles that run on compressed natural gas. Or you could run your car on the hydrogen. Or you could build a steam car and run it on coal.
The advantage of creating liquid fuels rather than hydrogen or electric or steam or whatever is that we can still use most of our existing infrastructure rather than tearing it up and starting over. You don’t have to junk all the petroleum burning cars and trucks, instead you build plants to produce the same fuel as before only by different methods.
The reason we don’t do this today isn’t a failure of chemistry, it’s simply because it’s uneconomical to do so. You could run a car today on Jack Daniels whiskey instead of gasoline, only you don’t do it because Jack Daniels is more expensive than gasoline. You could run a car today on synthetic gasoline, only you don’t do it because synthetic gasoline would be more expensive than conventional gasoline, even when gasoline is $4/gallon.