@
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.
