"(Agrawal reports) ' Power for the electrolysis would be provided by carbon-free energy sources, such as solar, wind or nuclear power. And, unlike conventional methods of producing liquid fuels from plant matter and coal, H2CAR would not emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The goal is to accomplish the complete transformation of every carbon atom in the feedstock to liquid fuel by supplementing the conversion process with hydrogen from a carbon-free energy source,' Agrawal said.
The process also offers potential advantages over producing liquid fuels from coal using conventional methods, which emit carbon dioxide. Because H2CAR would not emit this additional carbon dioxide, the process would eliminate the need for proposed carbon dioxide sequestering.
'The tremendous convenience provided by the existing infrastructure for delivering and storing today's fuels is a huge deterrent to introducing technologies that use only batteries or hydrogen alone,' Agrawal said. 'A major advantage of our process is that it would enable us to use the current infrastructure and internal combustion engine technology.' "
We'll emphasize one final point, which we have made before: As noted in the excerpt's final paragraph, converting coal and biomass into liquid fuels would vastly reduce the need for the hugely-expensive infrastructure and national vehicle fleet adaptations that would be necessary to accommodate more radical transportation concepts, such as electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles. That, of course, is in addition to recycling and forestalling the emission of CO2; and, to keeping the all the miners and farmers represented on West Virginia's state seal gainfully employed