You can stop laughing now. There is nothing about gasoline itself that is inherently unsustainable. It is our primary source of gasoline that is unsustainable and generally problematic.Suppose some brilliant inventer comes up with a way to produce gasoline without having to refine some sludgy thing we dig out of the ground. Now we would no longer need to have massive mining operations (yes, extracting crude oil from oil reservoirs is technically mining), and we would be able to dispense with costly (both financially and environmentally) operations to extract usable material from oil sands, shale, undersea reserves, etc. That in itself would be a major net win even if everything else was exactly equal.
Now, let me take on a couple of obvious knee jerk objections.
First, you are probably thinking that this would do absolutely nothing about carbon emissions and global warming. (Whether you believe we are causing global warming or not, less emissions is going to yield better air quality in general.) It turns out that this particular “obvious” problem is a result of not thinking through the actual process.
The process or synthesizing gasoline must necessarily consume carbon from some source. After all, carbon is a major component in gasoline. Let me call this synthetic gasoline for the sake of discussion. The gasoline we currently use is usually obtained by refining crude oil or something similar. Let me call this fossil gasoline. Now fossil gasoline comes from hydrocarbons that were created in prehistory. The carbon used to create them was taken out of the carbon cycle millions of years ago. So when we burn fossil gasoline, we are effectively releasing new carbon into the atmosphere which, obviously, begins to overwhelm the relatively steady state the world enjoyed for a long time before we came on the scene.
Now, if the carbon for producing synthetic gasoline came from a similar source (say, coal or ancient rocks or other mined source), this new process would have exactly the same problems as the current fossil gasoline usage. But imagine, if you will, that the source of carbon is the atmosphere itself. Instead of adding new carbon to the atmosphere by burning fossil gasoline. imagine that the carbon released by burning synthetic gasoline was simply replacing that which we already removed from the atmosphere. In short, imagine that we close the loop and turn our fuel production and use into a cycle. This would obviously yield a net steady state for carbon output due to gasoline use.
The other objection is that it will take energy to produce this gasoline, and that energy has to come from somewhere. That is, of course, exactly true. But the current mining and refining stages also require energy and that also has to come from somewhere. And, don’t forget, that energy had to be input into the system to create the fossil fuels in the first place anyway. Synthetic gasoline would actually take a fair amount of the work out of the process, meaning that there would be no need for prospecting or expensive mining operations with their attendant environmental damage. We would essentially be reducing the system to simply a refining stage. That, alone, would be a net win on many levels.
Imagine, however, we could make use of a clean source of energy to do gasoline synthesis. Imagine running our chemical factory on something that is readily available. Something like, for instance, sunlight. Every day, an insane amount of energy is delivered directly to the Earth from a conveniently located fusion reactor, otherwise known as the sun. Imagine we could harness a portion of that energy to drive chemical processes that ultimately produced gasoline. Further, imagine that same energy source could be used to drive mechanical processes to extract the newly produced gasoline.
The latter is no stretch. After all. solar electricity generation is hardly a new thing. The former, however, is also no stretch. After all, photosynthesis as used by plants is exactly the same sort of process, though instead of producing gasoline it produces other molecules. True, it may not be exactly possible to directly synthesise gasoline through a photosynthesis type reaction, but at the very least, plants using photosynthesis could be used as an input for other life forms, say bacteria, which can do the synthesis. This is not really so far fetched given that yeast, for instance, produces alcohol.
Of course, that is only one possible method. Other energy sources could be just as viable. Things such as tidal or nuclear electricity, chemosynthesis, and so on could be viable for various stages in the process.
This would not have any need to use up valuable agricultural land if it were set up in factory settings. Since we already have an effective infrastructure for transporting gasoline, these can be very high intensity operations which can support a very large portion of the population.
Pretty much any other disadvantage of synthetic gasoline is also a disadvantage of fossil gasoline and can be completely discounted in the analysis of whether synthetic gasoline is a better alternative. After all, stopping a better technology from replacing an old one because it isn’t perfect is rather like saying that because there is no cure for the common cold, one should not use a pain killer to alleviate the pain from a sinus headache.
It should be obvious, but I will say this anyway. Even though I referred to gasoline in the preceeding, the same notion could be applied to any sort of hydrocarbon or petrochemical.