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Indemnity4 t1_j6vqxk8 wrote

Reply to comment by alexefi in Ask Anything Wednesday - Physics, Astronomy, Earth and Planetary Science by AutoModerator

The German chemical company Brabag was able to successfully make oil from coal in WW2 on the scale of a factory. Downside is it cost about 4x as much as simply extracting oil and refining it. Doesn't sound like much, but you could build 4 refineries for the price of that single one. Only makes sense when your nation has so much coal it's almost free and you are isolated from oil producing countries.

Then it depends on how close we need it to look to crude oil and what you need it to do.

To make a forgery to pass some legal case could be done, but it would be expensive to the price of maybe $10k - you would probably take an existing oil and add a few extra things to it.

To make a synthetic oil for lubrication is easy. We can even turn biomaterial into synthetic oils.

However, all of this is usually negated by the cost to be practical. You end up in silly situations where you have to burn half your oil to make the next batch.

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alexefi t1_j6vsm6m wrote

Thank you. I would expect it to be very expensive just like making gold from mercury. It was more curiosity if we able atrificially recreate something that happens naturally to see if our theory on how things were back in the time are correct or not. I remember reading somewhere that someone put same stuff that was in primodeal soup put it in enclosed enviroment and shot some electricity through it(imitating lightings) to see if any biological stuff gets creates to see if thats how it was when earth was forming.

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Indemnity4 t1_j6zz45q wrote

> able atrificially recreate something that happens naturall

This has been done.

Take some biomaterial like wood, feed it to bacteria, then compress+heat with some time. The result is a bunch of hydrocarbons that look like some type of crude oil.

We can change the feedstock (trees, leaves, animals), change the bacteria, fungi, etc, change the pressure and temperature, easily manipulate the time.

Mostly, we don't want crude oil. That fingerprint is good at identifying the source, but it's not very useful for the effort we put it. We want to make valuable hydrocarbons. Modern examples of this are anaerobic digestions. For instance, all your household waste that goes to landfill. We can bury that and put an exhaust pipe inside. Eventually, all the microbes in the landfill start to make methane gas + a heavy crude sludge that sinks to the bottom.

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