The cost of making oil is less than pumping it out of the ground so why is it not done yet?

Answer 1

If you can think of a way of synthesising oils from Carbon and Hydrogen atoms in SUFFICIENT quantities to replace the amount produced by 'pumping it out of the ground', you'll be the richest man on Earth and a genius.

Answer 2

Actually, this is a very good question. I've read several times about a pilot plant operation that renders organic waste into combustible oils and ash. The pilot plant was set up to use the many tons of turkey waste that had been going to a landfill every day. The process is a high temperature, high pressure reduction of the waste, with less than 25% of the recovered oils being used as process heat and for electricity generation. In other words, a self sustaining process, with a high oil yield and a huge volume reduction in landfill able waste. The last article I read was about a year ago, so I don't know if the process has progressed beyond the pilot plant stage or whether significant difficulties were encountered.
The only source I'm sure of is Popular Science, But I think I read about it in Scientific American as well.

Answer 3

Oil can be made from coal and plants at a production cost that may be less than the current selling price of oil pumped from the ground depending on what today's price is and how you do the accounting.

One of the reasons it isn't being done on a large scale is that someone would have to pay to construct factories to do it. Unless investors are very confident that the price of conventional oil will remain high for many years, they won't invest the money. Investors would also need to be confident that the price of the source material will remain at a level that will keep synthetic oil competitive with conventional oil.

Answer 4

That is an erroneous question.

To "make" oil from carbon and hydrogen costs substantially more than the $70 per barrel that oil companies are currently selling oil for. On top of that, "making oil" has substantial negative implications for the environment such as use of prime agricultural land (methanol and biodiesel for example), use of water resources, and production of greenhouse gases to produce the synthetic oil.

On an economic basis, pumping natural oil out of the ground is, and will continue to be, a lot cheaper than synthesizing oil.

Answer 5

Making oil (and gasoline) is what refineries do with the "oil" that is pumped out of the ground. A 42 gallon barrel of average "Crude oil" only contains about 10 gallons of gasoline. All the reformers and other big things at the refiners take other things in the "oil" and make gasoline out of it (about another 10 gallons) because that is the most profitable and desirable product. Some other things that are produced out of crude oil are lube oil, asphalt, wax, parrafin, LPG, butane, jet fuel, kerosene, sulphur, etc.

Answer 6

I agree with georock1959 on this one.
It isn't cheaper to synthesis oil than pump it. I'm not sure where you've gotten your sources from.

Another reason why something like that would not happen, even if it were in fact more economic, would be because oil companies own so much money. They could (and may already) easily buy out any rising alternative fuel advances.

Answer 7

Beats me.

Perhaps there is more at play than just large scale economics, and some greedy companies would lose a lot by having a switch on a large scale. I am personally baffled by the fact not more support is given to Changing World Technology process of turning garbage into oil, which takes care of 2 problems at the same time.