I'm a bit of a futurist, and like to keep up on new sciences and technologies, so given my environmental views clashing with my petrol head views I thought this was quite good... producing synthetic petrol.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/279153
A team of scientists based at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden have made a "revolutionary" discovery about how hydrocarbon is formed, learning that animal and plant fossils are not necessary to form crude oil.
The discovery, the scientists
say, means that the world will never run out of crude oil.
Great. Although I think we should look more at less polluting ways of powering our lives (plastic, chemicals, oil, petrol), for example most people could do with an electric car... most don't care how they work, just that it gets them from A-B, so petrol could be saved for us that like the sound (and power) of a whacking great V8, or turbo'd YB.
Kutcherov had recently proven that hydrocarbons can be created out of water, calcium carbonate and iron, and this means that crude oil is a sustainable, renewable resource, according to reports. However, this discovery does not mean that emissions from the combustion of hydrocarbons do not create climate change.
Now I'll state here, that I've never beleived that oil comes from the compacted remains of animal and plant life buried deep underground. Coal maybe, but not oil. I'm of the belief that crude is abiotic, and is generated by the mantle under the earths crust.
BUT, and heres the killer, a little bit at the end of the article....
These recent discoveries were found by building on a German process referred to as the Fischer-Tropsch type (FTT) genesis. Germany had plenty of coal but very little petroleum, which prompted a serious push by German scientists to find a way to create a substitute fuel.
The FTT process was developed and patented in the 1920s, and was subsequently used throughout World War II by Germany and Japan. The
process has been the basis for the creation of jet fuel made from water in the United States, as reported by
Wired magazine.
So for the past 8 decades, the tech has been there, but we've just been paying trillions through the nose (exhaust) to big oil companies and already too rich Arabs.
Hmmm...