Coal LIquefaction for Alternative Fuel?

April 04, 2009

Newsmax.com – Coal Liquefaction for Alternative Fuel?

Herein a cogent and detailed discussion of coal-to-liquid fuel, it's current realities and future potentials.

An excerpt:

"The best news of all is the cost of producing synthetic fuels. Rentech of Denver, Colo., a principal producer of synthetic fuels, performed a “scoping” study for the state of Wyoming in 2005. Based on those figures, synthetic fuel production — including both capital and operating costs — using Powder River Basin Coal at $30 per ton plus 10 percent interest would be $1.85 a gallon.

(Using, Mike, low-BTU, high-ash - compared to WV bituminous - Great Plains lignite. It's easier - i.e. cheaper - to mine, but it's also a lot further from markets and will produce much more inert waste.)

Increasing the present mining of 1 billion tons of coal per year by an additional billion tons, with the conversion into synthetic fuels at the ratio of 1.25 barrels per ton, the U.S. could reduce imports of crude oil by 15 percent, or reduce import costs by $100 billion per year."

It would buy us time, Mike, to develop truly renewable energy sources, and save us the money for that research, so that we could conserve, and redirect, our coal into the far more valuable applications of manufacturing raw materials to supply our chemicals and plastics manufacturing industries - as in Eastman's Kingsport, Tennessee, plant; as in China's planned 88 coal conversion plants, the bulk of whose produce is intended, according to their 5-Year Plan, to supply their chemicals, plastics and fertilizer industries.