Yes, we have even made bacteria that excretes fuels. But nothing that competes with just pulling hydrocarbons out of the ground at scale like we have with diamonds.

The main scaling issue is that the constituent carbon still has to come from somewhere, and one of the main carbon sources we have is… oil.

The best solution is to move away from carbon based fuels.

Conscious (sentience / sapience) is an ineffable, unmeasurable, quality. There is no way to say that one sentient being is more or less sentient than another. In fact there is no way to tell that I am not the only consciousness in existence but it feels rude not to give others the benefit of the doubt. We can create neurons and even small brains in the lab but we don’t have any way to instill life into that neuron. Consciousness simply emerges out of the constituent parts of being alive, possibly even as a result of the interactions of such a complex system.

Consciousness is 100% an emergent property.