Comment by tialaramex
16 hours ago
Oil is processed using fractional distillation, we're not making the kerosene, in some sense a fraction of the oil "was" kerosene and we just split that out from the rest.
It's not important that the kerosene was once a dead organism, we can technically just make it with energy, carbon and water, it's basically a narrow range of hydrocarbons so you synthesize a suitable mixture of CxHx chains and that'll work for e.g. the turbines in a passenger aeroplane. Today that's not economically sensible because you can just buy oil, but when the oil runs out, or we aren't processing nearly enough for other reasons already it could in principle make sense to literally do solar power + CO2 + water => kerosene.
As long as thermodynamics allow, everything is possible.
The question always is who is gonna pay for it?
Societies have other priorities much higher on their list compared to energy cleanness.
"Natural" Oil is literally finite, we're currently burning everything which died over millions of years, when we say it isn't "renewable" that's not some vague idea about the planet not overheating (though to be sure if we heat the planet up and make it uninhabitable that would suck for us) but that literally it's running out.
So "who is gonna pay for it" is everybody, eventually.