“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.
Yes. You can go to any motor vehicle section or automotive store and purchase synthetic oil.
Conservation of energy and matter being things though… There’s probably still a problem.
I recall reading about scientists making algae (GMO) produce oil from photosynthesis and also from engineered microbes consuming sugars.
Big oil probably buried them, literally. Heh… These things are tricky to scale as oil is relatively ‘dirt cheap’ and the investments into them are often more than the yield.
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.
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.
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…
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.
To answer this question, it is important to understand how oil is used.
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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.
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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.
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oil is a slurry of stuff that we found ways to process it into useful stuff. We can make ethanol and methane from fermantation and such and from that you can make pretty much any organic compound that you want to. Won’t be as cheap as slurping up oil though and filtering out what you want. Especially when its subsidized.
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.
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.
Nah, it burns quite clean. At least for combustion.
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.
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.
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
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 best clean fuel is Hydrogen. Can be made by zapping water with electricity. From Hydrogen, a more storage friendly “dense” fuel is ammonia made entirely by combining Hydrogen and Nitrogen(air). Ammonia can be very easily disintegrated into Hydrogen with modest heat, and there are direct fuel cells that work with it as well. These are the best 2 clean fuel candidates. H2 is cheaper to make, Ammonia cheaper to store/transport.
More expensive, but possible, is synthethic oil/carbohydrates. Combining Hydrogen with CO2/CO that tends to be obtained from fossil fuels, but even if from air, using/burning the synthethic carbon fuels put the CO2 back into the air.
It is much cheaper to use cheap hydrogen/ammonia and redesign power systems (Fuel cells are 2x more efficient than combustion engines) than it is to clean the air, and spend more energy to do the chemistry. Methane is cheaper than kerosene/diesel because it is a shorter molecule.
Trucks and planes will spend at least 4x in fuel than their purchase price. Compared to $4/gallon diesel/kerosene, fuel costs can be reduced 75% with green H2, but would increase with synthethic fuel. Ships spend 8-10x their cost in lifetime fuel. Clean shipping fuel (MGO) is the same as diesel (but can increase costs to 16x purchase price).
Transition path is to Hydrogen economy is to make new designs purposefully for H2/NH3 for operational savings over hydrocarbons. Range extender self-powered trailers for EVs that are rented is an application, as is 1mw EV charging infrastructure. But H2/NH3 already have massive chemical/industrial applications that support local “synthesis”. Home fuel cells that power heat pumps and convert waste heat to “free domestic hot water” is a great system for converting massive solar farms in northern climates that barely keep up with winter energy needs but have massive summer surpluses to make H2 with. A domestic fuel cell would provide electricity of 6c/kwh assuming they need domestic hot water.
There is also a clean path of making H2 from natural gas (pyrolysis) that creates solid pure carbon suitable for graphite or nanotubes or more simply battery anodes. This is cheaper than water electrolysis up to $12/mmbtu NG. With a carbon tax (should be $300/ton) of $150, then converting all NG to H2 through pyrolysis makes sense.
The economics of entire NG business as usual industry converting to chemical/H2 use instead of combustion:
To raise the cost of natural gas (NG) by
$8/MMBtu under a 4% leakage rate and GWP80 (80x methane potency), the baseline carbon price must be set at approximately $68.34 per tonne **
CO2ecap C cap O sub 2 e
𝐶𝑂2𝑒**.
At this carbon price and a higher $300/ton specific carbon credit, methane pyrolysis gains a massive economic advantage, while “leak-proofing” infrastructure serves as the only way for traditional NG production to survive high-tax environments.
1. The Pyrolysis Premium
At a $300/ton carbon price, methane pyrolysis receives a “premium” or avoided-cost benefit of $15.92 per MMBtu.
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How it works: Traditional NG combustion releases ~53.06 kg of
CO2cap C cap O sub 2
𝐶𝑂2
per MMBtu. Pyrolysis captures this as solid carbon. At $300/ton, the value of that avoided emission is $15.92.
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The Total Advantage: When you combine the $15.92 credit with the fact that pyrolysis avoids the $8.00/MMBtu penalty faced by combustion-based users, the total economic “swing” in favor of pyrolysis is nearly $24 per MMBtu—rendering traditional gas heating or power plants entirely uncompetitive.
2. Leak-Proofing for “Business as Usual”
For a natural gas producer to return to a “Business as Usual” (BAU) cost structure while facing this carbon tax, they must invest in reducing leaks from 4% down to 1%.
- The Cost Savings: At the calculated $68.34/tonne carbon price, reducing leaks to 1% drops the “leakage tax” from $4.37 to just $1.09 per MMBtu.
- Total Tax Burden: Even with 1% leaks, the producer still faces a combustion tax of roughly $3.63/MMBtu. The total tax at 1% leakage would be $4.72/MMBtu—nearly 40% lower than the $8.00 penalty at 4% leakage.
3. Necessary Investments for 1% Leakage
To achieve and maintain a 1% leakage rate across the supply chain, the following industry-wide investments are required:
- Pneumatic Device Replacement: Replacing all gas-powered pneumatic controllers with zero-emission electric or air-driven systems to eliminate intentional venting.
- LDAR (Leak Detection and Repair): Implementation of continuous satellite and drone monitoring (e.g., MethaneSAT) combined with monthly optical gas imaging (OGI) inspections.
- Dry Seal Retrofits: Replacing “wet seal” centrifugal compressors with dry seals, which can reduce methane emissions at compressor stations by over 90%.
- Pyrolysis Integration: Directing “flash gas” and other vent streams into small-scale, modular pyrolysis units at the wellhead to convert fugitive methane into storable solid carbon and hydrogen fuel for onsite power.
Where LDAR is taxpayer funded, the paybacks of all retrofits mentioned are about 1 month. The $300/ton carbon tax figure is mentioned because optimistic air capture system “brochures” promise such a future cost. If you want to make green synthethic fuels that is the minimum input cost of the CO2 that will be released right back into atmosphere. So solar -> H2 is simply a far better economy, but incumbents incompetent in solar can choose to invest in air capture to improve on the $300/ton cost if they think that will pay off. It’s no longer BS advertisements about green efforts, it is fucking do it or die.
Thank you, ChatGPT.
Just for last point formatting. It included some useless numbers though. Still underlying the point of industry continuity is important even if it must be forced into it.
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