Nazi Germany famously tried to develop synthetic replacements for petroleum. In their context, they had a massive war going on, and they did not have great access to regular oil deposits or sources.
They weren't successful at replacing non-synthetic petroleum products on a large scale. By the end of the war, their air force couldn't fly anywhere for lack of fuel, and their army had almost entirely reverted to horse-based transport instead of trucks.
"Sucking it out of the earth" isn't necessarily the problem, burning oil is the problem
Fischer-Tropsch is one process for doing it. But it's generally not terribly practical as an energy investment. The main source of energy in a hydrocarbon is the hydrogen. Where are you getting the hydrogen from? If your answer is oil: Bzzt! You're greenwashing for the fossil fuel industry, no thanks!
If your answer is electrolysis or thermolysis of water: Great choice! But it takes a lot of energy to do this. Where are you getting the energy? If your answer is the power grid: Bzzt! You're greenwashing for the fossil fuel industry, no thanks! If your answer is renewable energy: Great choice! But now you've got a lot of renewable energy that you could just use directly instead of using it for hydrogen. If you're still intent on turning it into hydrogen, okay, that's a valid choice. Let's continue.
Now you've got hydrogen, and you've used renewable energy to make it, great! What's your next step? Well, you could just burn the hydrogen or use it in fuel cells. This is about the most efficient thing you can do with hydrogen. But hydrogen is really difficult to store safely in large quantities, it's not energy-dense, and it can be dangerous since it's highly volatile and explosive. We have little to no infrastructure for it and quite a few high profile disasters that give it a bit of a bad reputation.
Here's where the interest in hydrocarbons starts. You can slam 4 of those troublesome hydrogen atoms (2 hydrogen molecules) onto a single carbon atom and now you've got methane. It's somewhat more energy dense, much easier to transport and store, and safer to work with. We are very familiar with this product, we already use a slightly impure fossil fuel form of it called natural gas everywhere and we have all the infrastructure and experience we need to take great advantage of it.
But first, we have another question to answer. Where are you getting the carbon? If your answer is atmospheric carbon dioxide: Great choice! This is not as easy as it seems though and takes more (renewable) energy, which is now compounding your investment into making fuel rather than making energy. If your answer is plants: Okay choice! But now you have to grow the plants, and they're taking up farmland and sunlight and water that could be used for food, drinking, or solar panels. If your answer is oil: Bzzt! You're greenwashing for the fossil fuel industry, no thanks!
We can continue like this down the hydrocarbon chain, but the questions and problems and energy investment continue to compound massively as you move to increasingly denser, more convenient fuels. Methane can become Propane, and propane is a lot denser and more manageable than natural gas is, so that's nice, but is it worth it? Propane can then become Butane, Butane can become Octane, which starts to resemble Gasoline, and the chains get longer and get mixed in more complex ways, you start to get all the benefits of those heavier fuels we are used to, but it comes at a significant cost (financial and energy and opportunity costs all apply here) and increasing complexity and infrastructure needed to produce it and is it really worth it?
Where should we draw the line? Nobody has decided yet, but realistically it's probably going to be pretty low down the hydrocarbon chain if we end up using hydrocarbons at all. The familiarity of heavy hydrocarbons are simply not worth the effort to synthesize them at large scales when we can usually find easier and more efficient alternatives lower down the energy and cost investment levels.
Probably the only real answer here is: ignore hydrocarbons, their age has come and is waning. Going fully electric with better storage removes pretty much all troublesome steps and leaves only muchore efficient processes.
Trying to capture carbon and turn it back into the complex substance that crude oil is would probably take far more energy than it sequesters.
Yeah, in chemical basics putting molecules together requires energy. If we are doing that, we may as well just start using hydrogen as a fuel.
Hydrogen has its problems. I'm not sure those problems are as big as synthesizing hydrocarbons.
There are plant based oils already.
Plant-based oils and crude oil from the ground are completely different substances. The former is mainly composed of fatty acids, whereas the latter is mostly a mix of different hydrocarbons.
First of all, I meant plant based hydrocarbons. The same thing.
Second of all, fatty acids and hydrocarbons are not that different.
Fatty acids can be turned into hydrocarbons with already known processes, and some plants have been bioengineered to directly produce hydrocarbons as well.
Not everything in the world is as defined in the 1940's...
To answer this question, it is important to understand how oil is used.
As a Fuel. Oil holds a lot of energy which can be released by burning it. It is certainly possible to use other power sources (renewable energy, nuclear energy, coal etc.) It is also possible to produce biofuels, which apparently (for now) takes more effort than extracting oil from the ground and producing fuel from that.
For extracting chemicals. Many things are actually produced from chemicals extracted from oil, such as plastics. Some of these chemicals may be produced or extracted in other ways, others may not.
A way to conceptualize petroleum is "we found a giant battery underground, and it was fully charged (by dinosaurs)".
And if you think about it that way, it makes it easier to wrap your head around the reason most carbon capture (or other what if solutions, like synthetic oil) won't work.
If we find a good source of energy to try and change that "battery", we may as well use that energy directly instead of charging it.
Yes, you can synthesize petroleum products. No, it’s not worthwhile.
To over simplify: Think of oil as a chemical battery. It is the result of heat and pressure inputs that “charge” it. But our input energy source is mostly electricity, not heat and pressure and plankton, so making synthetic petroleum is energy intensive. Which is why we use other batteries like lead-acid and lithium. So the answer is we make renewable tech like solar panels and batteries that don’t rely on oil.
Technology Connections did the math and if solar panels were installed on an equivalent area to that dedicated to corn ethanol production, the electricity generated would exceed the current generating capacity of the USA.
Plastics and other petroleum derived products are a whole other conversation.
One more component is time. Oil is fossilized energy, created over millions of years of sunlight collection and geological formation, at no cost to us other than removing it and processing it into the different forms. Until it becomes too costly to find and extract, it will always be the preferred source as it is so energy dense.
About 100 years ago I think it was the army made something that can turn wood, cow pies, etc into a gas that can run a jeep or generator.
Look up “wood gasifier”
Although I’m sure it pollutes even worse than oil, and produces less horsepower.
Nah, it burns quite clean. At least for combustion.
You can buy modern wood gasifiers as central heating options. They are efficient and clean, but unfortunately more expensive than simpler options. I would have quite liked one myself, but the 8k € surcharge over the cheaper option went over my budget. Fore mobile applications: too bulky and heavy.
Synthetic oil is and has been a thing for a long time, used in lubricants.
It's too expensive to use it as fuel, though.
According to this thread, you could make it from corn or biomass:
https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/threads/what-actually-is-synthetic-oil-made-from.65528/
Chevron claims they have a synthetic oil made from 25% corn.
the price is the necessary parameter in the end. oil is plenty and will always be cheaper. as someone said above: burning is the issue
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