This is an old story but did not find it discussed here.. Making gasoline out of coal: Worse Than Gasoline: Scientific American for geeks there is some info on Fischer Tropsch process: Energy Balance: Gasoline from Coal.
ah yeah, FT. the silver lining is that you can use FT on any carbon rich source. Biomass, for example. But yeah, converting coal into oil is a bad, bad idea.
There are some technological developments.. as you mentioned using biomass to fuel Fischer Tropsch, increasing efficiency via using nano-catalyst (claimed 1.5 efficiency improvement), using surplus energy to generate electricity, etc. would be interesting to see how efficient can it be made.. with oil to gasoline the direct refinement only yields 30-40%, yet oil companies manage to get 80% with some creative cranking and technological advances.
Cyclo- I am often in agreement with you and Scientific American, but I feel we should be building with gov't assist some of these types of clean coal plants. The Scientific American article should really compare CO2 against coal combustion alternative, not against gasoline burning. If we make the assumption the USA will use the coal resources we have, then the question is how to best use it? There is an argument this is in national security also, to have back-up liquid fuels. So I would start the building, one in each quadrant of the country, and one in the middle. If the left coast opts out, we'll take 2 plants on the right coast. I will hold CO2 down by adding nat gas power plants + wind and a whole bunch of Prii. P.S.- Thanks for posting because it is along the lines I was thinking, too bad Sci Amer poo-poo'ed it.
tracy - I am not sure I am in agreement with Scientific American myself. For example the way they present FT does not sound like it was optimized to reduce CO2 output. They claim even with CO2 recapture 4-8% more CO2 then oil. This was before the iron nano-catalyst was available (there are a couple sources Rutler is one, Iran is another) which claims 1.5 times efficiency improvement. What impact does it have on CO2 balance? Did they look into complementing coal with biomass? with natural gas? One of the intermediate steps is conversion of coal to CH4, did they look using natural gas as a starting point? The second question the study done by MIT (SLOAN?) which claimed that 70 billion investment will only fulfill 10% of our needs. I am not familiar with intricate details of Fischer-Tropsch but it sounds that some portions of process will produce large amounts of thermal energy and it could be used to generate electricity. Was it looked at? Also it is possible that portions of process use equipment similar to oil refineries.. Did they look at reuse of current equipment? shared use?
It would be insanely short-sighted for the US to turn much more of its coal into fuel. The cost of sea level rise drowning our coastal areas and global warming wrecking our agriculture would be ten or a hundred times larger than the cost of going fossil free.
Richard I agree with you but unfortunately we live in a society that only reacts to things as they are occurring. So our coasts flooding will be sometime away and I am sure we will have some crazy half assed knee jerk reaction to fix it.
People forget this started in 1920s in American politics, and politicians since carter have wanted to waste lots of money based on some very bad energy assumptions [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Fuels_Corporation"]Synthetic Fuels Corporation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame] thankfully cheap gas cut off its funding, but its hand is out again with better tech. And if you buy gas some will be coming from alternatives like oil sands or gtl. Shell and chevron are heavily invested in getting natural gas into gasoline. Here is some more recent perspective Bad News: Scientists Make Cheap Gas From Coal | Wired Science | Wired.com
You are on the right track Cyclo. South Africa has been using Fischer_Tropsch on coal for many years successfully as one role model. Yes can do a lot of the same chemistry probably more cheaply with CH4 at current rock bottom costs, but it would be nice to carve a role for clean coal. CoGen is always a good idea, for example, we could have a 1000-MW ultra clean nat gas power plant and use the excess waste heat to provide energy to this new F-T plant we are going to build, thereby getting maybe as high as 75-80% efficiency from the nat gas. I don't think it would go the other way around you mentioned, not sure. As far as sea level rise, I am buying the home next door to Tripp when the time comes. I'd say next to Richard, but his Abide icon is too scary for me.
I remember those days Austin, we thought we were going to run out of crude oil by Year 2000, so hiring was ramped up to find alternate solutions. Next thing you know, they found more oil, and we stopped looking for alternates. Hiring was ramped back down. More recently, history has repeated itself with the unexpected new nat gas finds here at home. The energy future is predictable <not>. Although maybe now post-Tsunami world we have finally learned most of the main concepts, with reference also to renewables and global warming.
if all of the polar ice melts the sea level will rise 60m (200'). My house is at 194' above sea level. Granted it would take more then a few thousand years, no panic
Ehh, maybe not: the ice sheets don't have to melt where they are, they need merely need to slide off their foundations into the sea. Once that starts it could possibly be done within a few decades. Sea level rising a meter per year would be truly ugly. We're going to have $7 gas soon enough. At that price it's economical to make artificial carbon-neutral gasoline from atmospheric CO2 using any non-fossil energy source. I'd buy it now at that price, just as I bought a Prius even though solutions with smaller total-cost-of-ownership were available.
You are right if ice slides the level will go up instantaneously as it would displace the same volume. Still it will not happen in next 100 years? with respect to $7 it doesn't really matter where you stand on AGW, there is a good case to be made about conservation, 50MPG will keep transportation costs in check.
Even if there's lots of money to be made? Even if it'll create JOBS? Think what a boom this could be to the RV industry!
