Why not make oil if it can be made from anything that has some carbon?

Question

If everything that is now labeled as useless trash was transformed into oil and pumped into wells there would be a lot less CO2 to worry about.

Answer 1

Oil and all it's derivatives are nothing more than chains of hydrogen and carbon atoms.

It's relatively easy to crack the larger hydrocarbons into smaller ones and this happens on an industrial scale to produce all manner of products including gasoline.

Unfortunatley running the process in reverse is much more complicated and expensive. For example, it's easy to break a window into thousands of pieces but much harder to convert the pieces back into a window - same with hydrocarbon cracking.

If it could be made viable to convert trash into oil I'm sure every petrochemical company would sieze the opportunity. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they haven't already investigated doing just this.

The advantage would be more of a financial one rather than a reduction in CO2. By the time something becomes trash it's already been processed and the CO2 and other pollutants have been released. Many hyrdocarbons don't biodegrade (polythenes for example) so they just languish in landfill sites doing nothing.

Answer 2

I think Hot Turkey hit it right on the head.

We now can even transmute lead into gold..at the expense of a tremendous amount of energy expenditure, whose costs far outweighs the value of any gold produced.

We have changed a sow's ear to a silky purse, at the expense of a lot of energy and time and use of many chemicals, some of which are doubtless pollutants.

It is always necessary to separate what CAN be done from what is ECONOMICAL to do, and what is NEEDED to be done.

We CAN make "oil" from many things that are organic or contain carbon. So far, drilling and pumping what nature made with processes we can only approximate and on much smaller scale is MUCH more economical; if we make it we expend more energy than we can obtain, and the product we make is not generally as versatile.

And usually there are noxious byproducts we have to get rid of. Nature could use the pressure of thousands of feet of rock and the heat of compressed lava, that also caps in the byproducts and finally helps convert them to part of the oil. In periods of millions of years.

We do not have that option, really.

Our "Need" for oil can be met in other ways, though right now they are more expensive for all but very specialized applications.

And finally, why spend the tremendous amount of energy required to pump it IN to wells, just to spend even more energy later on to pump it back out? That would really seem foolish, to me. If we make it, use it!!

Answer 3

Why waste energy converting it back to oil if it was basically made from oil to begin with? With many objects it takes less energy to melt or grind them down and make new things out of them.

There are technologies available to do that to car tires, you also recover the oil, the steel and the carbon black, which are feedstock for ... making tires; but I still haven't received enough info from the company yet regarding their process to invest in or market it.

As for CO2, check the link. It's "an exciting idea" at this stage. Though I'm not convinced it will be effective either.

Answer 4

yeah, but it's about *efficiency*. it takes more energy to get oil out of trash, than the energy you'd get from the oil you got out of it!

certainly we should research new ways to get energy from our waste products. that's common sense. but right now, it's not really possible to do much with it.

Answer 5

I agree that it may someday be feasible, but why pump it back into wells? That's wasted energy...