eureka moment for cheap coal gasification

GlobeandMail | Scientists in Texas say they have found a way to convert coal into gasoline at a cost of less than $30 (U.S.) a barrel - with zero release of pollutants.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) announced last month that they have developed a clean way to turn the cheapest kind of coal - lignite, common in Texas - into synthetic crude. "We go from that [lignite coal] to this really nice liquid," Brian Dennis, a member of the research team, said in describing the synthetic crude that can be refined into gasoline.

Assuming that these Texas folk are correct, this advance in technology could represent a historic moment in energy production - for Canada as well as for the United States. Canada has huge reserves of lignite coal in Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan (which already gets 70 per cent of its electricity from this common coal) - not to mention in Nova Scotia.

The Texas researchers, who worked on the project for about 18 months, expect the cost to drop further. "We're improving the cost every day. We started off some time ago at an uneconomical $17,000 a barrel. Today, we're at ... $28.84 a barrel," Rick Billo, UTA's dean of engineering, told an Austin television reporter.

Texas lignite coal sells for $18 a tonne. The coal conversion technology uses one tonne of coal to produce 1.5 barrels of crude oil. One barrel of crude produces 42 U.S. gallons of gasoline. In other words, $18 worth of coal yields 63 gallons of gasoline: 0.28 cents a gallon.

In her report of the announcement, Dallas Morning News energy writer Elizabeth Souder said the U.S. government has approved construction of a small-scale microrefinery to test the UTA lab-based breakthrough. This prototype microrefinery should be in operation by year-end. "While the process doesn't create renewable fuel, it would create a domestic source for vehicle fuel and plastics," she reported.

Fueling the Fourth Reich

I've been tricked, duped, hoodwinked and bamboozled. Back in February, I suffered a momentary lapse of judgement. Without following the hype to its ultimate source, I erroneously surmised that perhaps the USAF was on the cusp of a new era of conservation and alternative energy development. I was mistaken. Instead of charting a new course for the future of American energy security, the USAF is mining the ignominious past to bring Nazi and apartheid South African coal gasification into peak production as the mainstay of American energy security. The USAF is going to further enrich Sasol and set a grim mold for future American energy security. It is an endless and profound irony that the American military - and by extension America itself - is compelled to stake its energy future on methods devised and depended upon by the world's most evil and hated regimes.

It's not at all hyperbolic to observe that the apartheid regime picked up where the Nazis left off when it came to producing gasoline from coal. Nazism, apartheid, and international sanctions created a fuel source that might never have existed in a better world.

The circuitous travels of the Fischer-Tropsch process, a chemical technique to convert natural gas and coal into liquid fuels, provide an object lesson in historical irony. Used by the Nazis to make oil from coal during World War II, it was commercialized by the century's second-most-odious racial supremacist regime in the 1950s through South Africa's state energy company. Now, that privatized company, Sasol, may help liberate Western democracies (and non-Western ones, like India) from the grip of crude oil produced largely by loathsome authoritarian regimes.

Sasol is the ExxonMobil of South Africa, though its annual sales of about $10 billion are around what Exxon Mobil does in about 10 days. With 30,000 employees, including the largest number of Ph.D.s of any company in the Southern Hemisphere, Sasol is one of South Africa's largest employers. It produces about 38 percent of South Africa's fuel needs and accounts for about 4.4 percent of the country's GDP.

As the US Air Force continues engine testing in a drive to quench its huge thirst for fuel with synthetic blends, pioneering energy company Sasol of South Africa is nearing approval of a 100% synthetic jet fuel. Airlines are looking to coal-to-liquid and gas-to-liquid fuels as drop-in replacements for expensive and finite petrol­eum, and global development of facilities to produce these alternative jet fuels is well underway. Coal - the jet fuel of the future.....,

NPR Disinformation

I listened to this story this morning while taking my daughter to sports conditioning. All during the broadcast, I was deeply intrigued by the apparent need to lie. Why the narrative imperative to mislead the public in light of the fact that the USAF has already taken its decision on what next vis a vis meeting its exorbitant thirst for fuel?

The Defense Department is the government's largest consumer of petroleum products, like gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.

And if it costs $100 to fill up an SUV, just imagine what it takes to gas up a stealth bomber.

The Air Force is the biggest user of fuel, consuming 71 percent of the military's gallons. Those huge aircraft that transport personnel and equipment all over the world are not economy boxes. Take the C-5 Galaxy, which can carry 135 tons: It gets .07 miles per gallon.

And the armies on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't driving hybrids. In Iraq alone, the military burns more than a million and a half gallons a day.

Lt. Col. Brian Maka puts the Pentagon's fuel expenses in perspective. "Generally, a $1 increase in the price of a barrel of oil on the open market translates into an increase for the whole department of $130 million," Maka says.

Over the last six months, oil prices have increased by roughly $50 a barrel. Naturally, that translates into a huge spending increase.

The Defense Department prepares its budget 18 months in advance and had no way of predicting that oil prices would increase this much in such a short period of time.

"The implication of that is since these fuel costs go into our ... operations and maintenance budgets, those are going to be the budgets that are hit the hardest," says Dov Zakheim, a former controller for the Defense Department. "The problem is that those are the very same budgets that are ... paying for our operations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. So it's kind of a vicious circle, and a very, very difficult one to deal with."

And it's probably not going to get any better any time soon.

"We anticipate over the next three months that the increase in fuel costs for the department [will be] $1.2 billion," Maka says, adding that the Defense Department will likely have to go back to Congress to ask for additional funding.

In Congress, several senators have proposed that Iraq should start paying for some of the military's fuel costs because of its large oil reserves.

But Zakheim says he doesn't think that's going anywhere.

"I'm just not sure that the Iraqi government would respond the way we might hope them to," he says.

Instead, Zakheim thinks the Pentagon will throw its considerable research and development resources into finding alternative fuels.

"My guess is that we are going to see something like other cases in the past where the Pentagon forged ahead in the science and technology world because it was impelled to do so," he says. "After all, the Internet did start with the Pentagon."

But that kind of research and development takes time. Meanwhile, the meter is still running — faster and faster.

Why is the public message at odds with the actual intentions released not too long ago into the public domain? Or, is this the USAF's way of gradually socializing coal gasification as the shape of things to come on both the mission and the domestic energy production fronts?