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Isn’t there a way to make gasoline in a laboratory?

Like I know gasoline is a byproduct of refining crude oil and everything , but how come we can't just make it by combining the base chemicals? Isn't gasoline just hydrogen and carbon atoms? How come we haven't figured out a way to reproduce it completely synthetically? It's probably a dumb series of questions but it's one that has always bothered me because I've never been given or found a good answer.
Elena05 · F
well... there is this thing called chemical energy... so oil has a high energy level that when it burns releases this energy...

to make oil you have to put in energy... basically the heat and pressure that created oil over millenia naturally.
Elena05 · F
@TurtlePink alright.. starting to eat beans and onions... oh wait...
Shaveit · 61-69, M
@SomeMichGuy Someone asked to sensible question… And some stupid jackass make some stupid answer
@Shaveit I'm not sure if you are going after me or the responder making a joke on "wind power", but I don't think she's a stupid jackass, bor am I stupid.

I *am* pointing out how we have a huge deficit to overcome, in agreement with our tongue-in-cheek "wind" power poster. Trying to create artificial petroleum, *today*, v. the slow creation over millions of years...no wonder it can be energy-intensive.

If we could go back in time and put organic waste--some garbage, grass clippings, trimmings from bushes & trees, etc.--in an area which we knew would undergo the long years of compression, etc., we could return & get more oil for free...

The if the total energy required is E, then, for a period Δt, you can have an average rate of energy increase

(E/Δt)

for that period in order to get to the goal, E.

If you can wait a vast stretch of time--like how we happened upon petroleum many years after the living matter died--you can deal with a small average rate of energy added. OTOH, if you need it in a much shorter time, you have to greatly increase the average rate of adding energy.

But that's pretty simple.

If you see my other response here, there was an interesting paper by some Chinese researchers which uses a simple system to make small amounts of ethanol by using the daily cycle of temperature variation to fuel a CO capture process. It's an intriguing idea, and the notion of using micro-level technology, in massive arrays, to get macro-results makes sense to me as a very promising direction for solving at least some problems.
heavyone2 · 61-69, M
Well,, if my history serves me correctly... the Germans did it in WW2 but it would not be cost effective to mass produce. They did it out of have no gas , diesel or anything available... it did work though. They carried that secret with themselves after the war..... not sure how it was "actually done" but it happened.
heavyone2 · 61-69, M
@Tracos Yes it is a dirty fuel but it's fuel. It was cheaper than "regular gas" in the late 80's. I bought it at the CTC Stations and it ran great.
heavyone2 · 61-69, M
@SomeMichGuy Age takes away everything,, and my ability to spell and type got hit hard...lol.
@heavyone2 u kn smelp n thaip ?
SW-User
Because money talks..they get paid selling gas, and unfortunately, it's a way to control the consumers. (Us.)
The more power they have over what we spend, the more control they have.
SW-User
@TurtlePink It's kinda sad..but yeah..money equals success. Greed creates need, and large corporations make bank.
Pretzel · 61-69, M
@SW-User just an economist
@SW-User I'm not sure what you mean by controlling us through gas, but the oil & utility companies were put in charge of a lot of alternative energy research, and that did not really work out.

If we had just been serious back when OPEC slapped the West in the face (1973, the "energy crisis"), we'd already be SOOO much further along the path to reducing greenhouse gases, fixing the C budget problem, achieving energy independence, etc.

So much from a sandstorm which affected helicopters in rhe desert...smh
Tracos · 51-55, M
it takes too much energy to be efficient
@Tracos Yes, it would typically seem to be the case.

See the Chinese researchers' paper I point out elsewhere in this post for a different notion.
@StevenIzzi Quite funny!
MarineBob · 56-60, M
How many politicians are heavily invested in oil?
TurtlePink · 22-25, F
@MarineBob all of them
Pretzel · 61-69, M
@MarineBob "invested in" sounds so much nicer than "bought of with" doesn't it
TurtlePink · 22-25, F
@Pretzel heart my comments
FrozenWasteland · 61-69, M
I'm not a chemist, but I expect that the amount of energy required to assemble gasoline from scratch would make it cost prohibitive, compared to dinosaurs juice that starts with such a huge amount of energy already present.
Hmmm...actually, there was movement on this last year

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20517-1

(PDF at

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20517-1.pdf)

A more accessible summary is

https://www.thedrive.com/news/38707/scientists-found-a-way-to-make-synthetic-gasoline-out-of-thin-air

[sep]

A wikihow about three methods is

https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Synthetic-Gasoline

This covers at least one idea mentioned elsewhere here.

 
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