Why don scientists do something useful and clone or replicate oil/petroleum?
I’m not sure whether this applies to you, but what do think is useful. One of my students asked a similar question. ‘Why can’t science do something useful about solving our problems’. I pointed out that she spends her life on a mobile phone, or plugged into her I-pod, dressed in synthetic fibres. She spends time on her PC communicating with her friends in a centrally heated home under electric light and is transported around the world by automobile and aeroplane. What else do you want science to give you? Now you want science to solve the problem of your energy profligate lifestyle. It is possible to synthesise hydrocarbon chains, the basis of oil. However to achieve this with any rapidity (nature takes millions of years) needs more energy put in than you can hope to get out. For efficiency you therefore need to start with something like glucose which has carbon and hydrogen already in it. But that means using land suitable for growing food to grow bio-fuel crops to supply the raw mate
