Coal-to-Liquid Is Just Plain Stupid
by Stacy Feldman - Jul 12th, 2007
Beware: Liquefied coal is not a solution to global warming. Not even close. So don't be fooled.
It may be in liquid form, but it's still coal. And it's the worst kind at that. In fact, if America shifted away from using Middle Eastern oil to liquefied coal, it could end up pumping out twice the volume of greenhouse gases. The Philadelphia Inquirer gets it. Too bad Washington doesn't.
Right now, there are a bunch of powerful pols (Democrats and Republicans) who are working hard to subsidize liquefied coal.
They're calling it the supreme alternative fuel to convince you. They'll tell you liquefied coal will lead to American energy independence. But they won't tell you about the costs to taxpayers. Environmental and economic. The NYT wrote about it a while back:
"It is estimated that it would cost $70 billion to build enough plants to replace 10 percent of American gasoline consumption."
Only ten percent? At that price? Not quite energy independence. If you throw in the fact that liquefied coal is a climate change nightmare, it's so clearly stupid policy.
And it becomes even more stupid when you learn that the whole coal industry employs only 80,000 people, and dropping. That's in a country of 300 million people in which 50 percent of energy comes from coal. (Hat tip: Daily Kos.) Compare that with the untapped renewable energy sector. Hundreds of thousands of new domestic jobs could come from renewables.
So given all this, why the support for liquefied coal?
It's the subsidies for the coal industry. The NYT:
"Among the proposed inducements winding through House and Senate committees: loan guarantees for six to 10 major coal-to-liquid plants, each likely to cost at least $3 billion; a tax credit of 51 cents for every gallon of coal-based fuel sold through 2020; automatic subsidies if oil prices drop below $40 a barrel; and permission for the Air Force to sign 25-year contracts for almost a billion gallons a year of coal-based jet fuel."
The coal industry is one of the biggest lobbying machines on Earth. They're doling out tons of dollars because they have a lot to gain subsidy-wise, at the public's expense. And remember, there's only 80,000 coal employees. So where would the subsidies go? Not back into the American economy, that's for sure.
The coal-to-liquid story is getting tons of press, and there's more to come. So here's what to look out for: When you hear a pol pushing for "alternative fuel," be leery. Despite what you hear, it's probably not green or clean. It's probably liquefied coal.
When you hear calls for "renewable energy," on the other hand, you can conclude good things. Wind. Solar. Biofuels. Energy independence and a solution to climate change. Now that's smart policy.
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Hydrogen is the key
The key to clean CTL is injecting enough H2 gas (produced from water splitting using renewable sources of energy) into the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert all of the CO produced by the reverse water-gas shift into synthetic fuels. It will be expensive, but it does not have to be done all at once and does not appear to be as insurmountably costly as it once seemed, given the amounts of money being spent in bailouts and stimulus packages these days. In addition, it avoids the danger to the populace (remember Lake Nyos in Cameroon, West Africa?) and dead drain on power companies of permanent sequestration of CO2 by producing extremely useful and valuable products, i.e., synthetic gasoline and diesel fuel. Complete utilization of the available carbon also reduces combined carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants and internal-combustion vehicles to about 40% of current levels and completely eliminates our dependence on foreign oil. Finally, it can be used in existing vehicles so that hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles can be perfected and phased in gradually. We need to get started on this ASAP.
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