Originally posted by ben91069
I am no scientist, but my first thought is that oil has a net energy greater than the energy required to pump it out of the ground and into your car.
Oil has many other uses as well, but this isn't my point.
The work of heat and pressure on dead bio matter was a free gift of geologic time to which if we tried to reproduce it in a lab, would mean we would
have to put in more energy to convert bio matter into oil. The final product would yield less energy than what was put into it.
That's pretty much it. Sure, there are all kinds of ways to get energy--we can use oil sands, or drill much deeper, in geologically/technically
difficult places (deep sea/Antarctica), covert coal to oil, or, yes, we can convert biomass to oil via pressure and temperature. But all of things
are energy/capital intensive processes, and usually prohibitively so.