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Originally Posted by Hobbs
I just find it interesting that in this time and age of technological advances that no one can come up with a valid, inexpesive, safe, clean alternative fuel. I mean, come on, why does the fuel we need to use have to include oil as a main ingredient?
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Physics. Specifically, conservation of energy. Anything we use as fuel has to have potential energy. Synthesizing hydrocarbons is certainly possible, but it takes energy to synthesize them -- more than can be released by burning them. We've got fairly few energy sources available
1) Direct solar. Lousy for vehicles, currently very inefficient for anything else. Photovoltaic solar cells can barely produce enough energy over their lifetime to account for the energy it takes to manufacture it. Large-scale solar plants attract the ire of environmentalists.
2) Biofuels. They work, but they're available only on a vastly smaller scale than crude. And to produce more means to produce less food. Some of them (ethanol in particular) take more energy to grow and extract than released when burning, so are useless as a primary fuel.
3) Nukular. Err, nuclear. Lousy for vehicles. Politically impossible. Environmentalists hate it. And there still is that waste issue.
4) Hydro. Pretty much tapped out, not directly usable for vehicles, and environmentalists hate it.
5) Geothermal. Very few places it can be practically tapped, not directly usable for vehicles. Environmentalists hate it.
6) Geophysical, e.g. tidal powered. Again, few places it can be practically tapped, not directly usable for vehicles, and environmentalists hate it.
7) Good old fossil fuels -- conventionally, solar energy stored in prehistoric times. An alternate theory holds that oil is left over from the formation of the solar system. Environmentalists hate them too (except natural gas, sometimes), but they're too firmly established for those concerns to kill them.
If you want something else usable as a fuel, you either need to find some other common substance with a lot of potential energy stored in it chemically, or figure a way to extract power from some available source so cheaply that it makes sense to synthesize a fuel rather than use refined oil.