Liquid Coal

It seems that the newest bad energy fad is taking congress by storm as "top Democrats were circulating a proposal to provide $10 billion in loans for plants that make diesel fuel from coal" as part of a larger energy bill. The problem with using liquid coal as a fuel is that even if it didn't require subsidies it would still be worse for the environment than all kinds of alternatives. Subsidizing it is just terrible. The good news is that Brian Beutler says Harry Reid will oppose this nonsense and he doubts it'll go through.

It was also good to see at the national security conference earlier this week that the message about the trouble with slogans about "energy independence" is breaking through. They had one panel on energy policy during which nobody used the term. A questioner asked why nobody had used the term, and everyone was unanimous in the view that it's become a pernicious concept. There's a problem with over-reliance on dirty fossil fuels, not with over-reliance on "foreign energy" as such.

Comments

Isn't liquid coal WITHOUT carbon sequestration awful, but WITH carbon sequestration it becomes a pretty attractive alternative?

Posted by Steve | June 14, 2007 9:03 AM

Isn't liquid coal WITHOUT carbon sequestration awful, but WITH carbon sequestration it becomes a pretty attractive alternative?

Carbon sequestration is not some magical fix. In the end we're going to have to radically reduce our carbon consumption, not find a way to shove it under a rock.

Posted by Christmas | June 14, 2007 9:38 AM

Re "There's a problem with over-reliance on dirty fossil fuels, not with over-reliance on "foreign energy" as such."
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I think this is totally wrong.

1) 1 barrel of oil yields 19.6 gallons of gasoline.
(Ref: http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/ask/gasoline_faqs.asp )

2) In 2006, we imported 806 Million barrels from the Middle East
(Ref: http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/mttimuspg1m.htm )

3) Our defense budget is approaching $900 BILLION/YEAR if you include all the "war on terror" supplementals (DOD and non-DOD),
DOD's Base spending,etc. If you include DOE's Nuclear programs, Veteran's Benefits ($78 Bil/year and heading higher) plus INTEREST
on all the debt run up with deficit spending to support bloated military budgets, you're talking more about $1.2 TRILLION/YEAR! That's
CONSUMPTION --not INVESTMENT. By my estimate, at least $600 BILLION year of that is tied to keeping military control of the MIDDLE EAST
--including the "war on terror" flowing out of that policy.
Ref:

4) Hence, we are spending roughly $600 BILLION / (19.6 x 806 Mil) =
roughly $38 !!! for every gallon of Middle
Eastern gasoline we import. You can quibble with the details -- but
you are still in the ballpark of over $30 /Gallon. Again, that's
ongoing CONSUMPTION that will get WORST as oil declines.

5) This is highly irrational, but it exists because Dick Cheney's buddies get all the profits whereas all the huges costs --in levied
taxes and dead/crippled relatives -- are dumped off onto us, the poor stupid citizens.

6) Note that the Republicans sabotage their much-Vaunted "free market" by hiding the huge costs of ME gasoline in the income tax (and by stealing
$4 TRILLION from the Trust Funds for Social Security/Medicare) while keeping the "market price signal" at the pump of only $3/gallon.
In order to sabotage any attempts by investors to develop alternatives
to Big Oil

7) The real disaster -- massive declines in human population -- will hit in about 20 years when oil starts running out at an exponential rate. That's because the malign policy of Bush/Cheney --the subsidy for Big Oil -- will ensure that our scientists will have neither the Money, the Time, or the INCENTIVE to develop alternative technology until it is much too late.
See

8) Ask yourself why NO US TV network, New York Times, Washington Post, or half-way prominent pundit has discussed the above situation in
the last 6 years.

Ask yourself why EVERYONE in the news supported Bush's lie that Sept 11 occurred because "they hate our freedom". The unquestioned lie that laid the groundwork for this huge spending.

Ask yourself why NO ONE in the news media asked the obvious questions about the non-existent Iraq WMDS: Was time really on the side of a 66 year
old dictator? Why use the vague,misleading term WMD instead of discussing specific weapons? Why were the Iraqi defectors and Chalabi not polygraphed?

9) It's too bad that Matthew's education in philosophy never led him to read Socrate's story in "The Republic" re the shadows on the cave wall.

What in world are they teaching at Harvard these days? Not arithmetic, evidently.

Posted by Don Williams | June 14, 2007 9:56 AM

There's a problem with over-reliance on dirty fossil fuels, not with over-reliance on "foreign energy" as such.

There's an environmental problem with over-reliance on dirty fossil fuels, and there's a strategic problem with over-reliance on "foreign energy," (especially from politically unstable regions.)

Why some intelligent people persist in discussing the two problems as if they were the same--or maintaining that one problem exists and the other doesn't--is beyond me. The only aspect I can see that the two problems share is that both of them could be addressed by decreasing our overall energy use.

Posted by James Gary | June 14, 2007 9:59 AM

I think with sequestration, liquid coal is approximately as bad as what we have now, or maybe slightly better or worse.

It's totally useless for helping global warming. Worse than useless (because of opportunity costs). As others have said, it is clearly a better policy to subsidize plug-in hybrids.

The only argument I'm aware of for liquid coal is that it reduces our dependence on foreign oil. While I'm not sure I agree with Matt that this is a meaningless thing to worry about, it's not enough reason to pursue this technology.

The reason why I think dependence on foreign oil is a problem is that it would seem to exacerbate our economy's dependence on a volatile region. So in other words, if there is some probability that a terrorist will nuke the Iraqi or Saudi oil fields, then our policy of using that oil increases the level of "risk" taken by our economy.

Now of course, the world economy is interconnected, so someone nuking the oil fields is never NOT going to affect us hugely. But, it would seem that if we were using half of the oil we use today, our economy may be less vulnerable to oil shocks.

Is there a counterargument I'm missing?

Posted by mk | June 14, 2007 10:01 AM

The true size of our Trillion dollar plus defense budget:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget%2C_2007
and http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1941

Posted by Don Williams | June 14, 2007 10:01 AM

The debate among experts over when the oil will starting running out:

http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article2656034.ece

Posted by Don Williams | June 14, 2007 10:06 AM

Oh, and let's not forget that the only really feasible solution to the energy crisis -- nuclear energy -- is tightly controlled and regulated by ..ta ..da.. the Bush Administration.

So if some well-meaning fool wants to work on the problem, he needs to ask "May I" from the Energy Department, wait 1 year for a Q clearance, and sign multiple contracts giving the government the right to censor anything he may write on the subject and leaving him liable to be imprisoned for decades if he violates any on several arcane security directions.

If he then wants to actually try to build a prototype, he gets to play rope-a-dope with the NRC for a decade or so. At the end of which time-- after the expenditure of much time and money -- the NRC will break his spirit by asking him to resubmit his proposal with an environmental impact statement satisfactory to the EPA.

Of course, such a well-meaning fool will never arise because he probably needs a physics education to develop feasible solutions. But we strongly discourage our brightest people from majoring in physics --by letting them know it will only lead to them having to compete for jobs with $12,000/year physicists imported from China and India.

Instead, we let our bright people know that productive people (doctors, engineers, scientists,soldiers,etc) always get screwed and that real success lies in being a con artist in Washington, in the law business, on Wall Street, or in the news media business.

In case our physicist doesn't get the idea, we allocate only small sums for research in physics and we let Europe build the next generation supercollider.

Oh, and in a comic touch we note that the CEO of Exxon has retired with a $400 MILLION package.
The new CEO of Exxon says that there's no need to develop alternatives to oil and gas.
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=12218&ref=rss

Then our President appoints a man to head the governments token push to develop alternatives to Big Oil. And President Bush appoints ..ta da..
the just retired CEO of EXXON.
See http://www.exxposeexxon.com/newsroom/raymond.html

Posted by Don Williams | June 14, 2007 10:35 AM

Oh -- I forgot the most hilarious part. Republican Congressmen then note that the government should leave solution of the energy problem to the "free market".

Posted by Don Williams | June 14, 2007 10:37 AM

There's a great scene in a great film -- Withnail and I -- in which Withnail, desperate for inebriation, has just downed a small container of lighter fluid. He turns upon "I" with the accusation that "I" has been harboring anti-freeze. "I" denies it and then says, "You mustn't mix your drinks". Withnail's look of wild surmise and his subsequent crazed laughter is a perfect image of the possibilities surrounding liquid coal -> diesel. Just when you're certain that current lunacy cannot be made more lunatic and that some sub-sub-basement of venality has been touched, Congress wants to SUBSIDIZE coal to diesel. [Withnail falls to the floor and loudly pukes.]

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 14, 2007 11:29 AM

Yes to CTL, No to Big Coal, Big Oil, Big Auto, Big Corn, Big Power, ... Subsidies

Folks, this situation -- fossile fuels and foreign oil -- have no single-minded solution and there should not be any narrow-minded protests to what might be part of a complex alternative to what we are on -- call it the wrong track.

Actually, there is a rather pure technological problem -- global warming caused by greenhouse gases. And, there is an old political problem, once called "naval coaling stations" and, later, "naval petroleum reserves", now vaguely called "dependence on foreign oil". Curoiously, they may lend themselves to a common political and economic approach.

Consider that the EU -- notably Germany and France -- are tackling global warming, a rather pressing vulnerability to cut-off of Russian natural gas, but also economic development generally with a complex mix of fuel and power technologies.

They are not worrying about or preserving the institutional vestiges of a Victorian or Edwardian "blue water", "high seas", "royal", or "imperial" fleet such as Anglo-Americans still have.

And, they always preferred the "National System" of economic development and trade policy associated with Alexander HAMILTON and Friedrich LIST to "Free Trade" doctrines usually associated with Smith and JEFFERSON but also embraced, loudly, by Theodore and, discreetly, by Franklin ROOSEVELT.

Today, we have a mix of both policies: That would be Free Trade ostensibly with "national security" but, also, other (non-tariff) restrictions on imports as well as import substitution subsidies for various declining industries. This makes sense and money for a comfortable elite of bi-partisan concession-tenders inside the Beltway.

But, otherwise, it makes no sense from a national security, economic development, or global development standpoint.

Thus, in BoWash and Greater London, technology is just a pretext for accomodating lobbyists for Big (meaning obsolete, declining) industries with subsidies, most of which is kicked-back into political patronage, not technology, industry, or new employment. Very often the ostensible policy of saving jobs at the bottom is one of extracting capital out the top.

The problem is that an infant industry may have a vast profit and new employment potential, but a declining industry still as a lot of wealth. It is a constituency. One solution to that political problem is the fact that in, say, the heavy chemical industry, an infant industry is probably a new process or product embedded in a whole complex of feedstock, product, and by-product. It is not a new industry or firm, so much as a rapid product/process development cycle.

We are going to use our low-quality coal in Texas. The challenge is mining it slowly, so as to protect land and water, then coking the coal to get the most energy and value out of it.

At some point, process-steam from nuclear power reactors and renewable biomass will substitute for coal and lower carbon-dioxide emissions. The challenge is not eliminating carbon-dioxide but balancing the rate people and animals produce it, even as forests recycle it.

It is a question of complex technical balance, not of simple-minded, moralistic prohibition, certainly not of Anglo-American imperialism.

Posted by John Robert BEHRMAN | June 14, 2007 1:17 PM

The best plans for liquid coal call for the use of nuclear power at the refinery. If that happens, the co2 problem goes away and we have a clean, plentiful fuel supply. We only have 30-40 years left on conventional oil, and severe shortages are projected to happen way before that. If there will be 9 billion mouths to feed, we had better give serious consideration to CTL if we expect human life to continue on this planet.

Posted by obewan | June 20, 2007 1:05 PM