Obama is pushing Liquefied coal - Good Idea that should be in Dem Platform -or not?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/09/AR2007010901503.html

The Green Gripe With Obama: Liquefied Coal Is Still . . . Coal.

By Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 10, 2007; A11



Who, but who, would soil the environmental reputation of Barack Obama?

The Democratic senator from Illinois gets stellar marks from greens. Just a few months ago he was calling global warming "real," saying: "It is here. . . . We couldn't just keep burning fossil fuels and contribute to the changing atmosphere without consequence."

So why then, environmentalists ask, is Obama backing a law supporting the expanded use of coal, whose emissions are cooking the globe? It seems the answer is twofold: his interest in energy independence -- and his interest in downstate Illinois, where the senator's green tinge makes the coal industry queasy.

The coal industry praises Obama's reintroduction, with Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.), of the Coal-to-Liquid Fuel Promotion Act of 2007 last week, which would provide incentives for research and plant construction. The industry says the technology, which converts coal into diesel engine fuel, would reduce America's dependence on foreign oil through a new, home-mined fuel that burns as cleanly as gasoline.

Environmentalists say focusing on coal does nothing to arrest climate change. Instead, they say, lawmakers should back cleaner alternative fuels and stricter automobile and industrial emissions standards.<snip>



FOR YOUR INFORMATION:

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There is a peak coal date even before we factor in using coal to replace oil. A recent (2003) study by scientist Gregson Vaux, which takes those factors into account, estimates that coal could peak in the United States as early as 2032, on average. "Peak" does not mean coal will disappear, but defines the time after which no matter what efforts are expended, coal production will begin to decline in quantity and energy content. The disappearance of coal will occur much later, around the year 2267, assuming all other factors do not change.

http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1SEC818434

Most of the direct processes developed in the 1980s were modifications or extensions of Bergius's original concept. The coal is ground so that it can be mixed into a coal derived recycle solvent to form a coal-oil slurry feed. The slurry containing 30-50% coal is then heated to about 450°C in a hydrogen atmosphere between kPa pressure for about one hour.

A variety of catalysts are used to improve the rates of conversion to liquid products. One tonne of coal yields about one-half tonne of liquids. Processes have been developed to use coals from low rank lignites to high volatile bituminous coals. Higher-rank coals are less reactive and anthracites are essentially non-reactive.

The liquids produced have molecular structures similar to those found in aromatic compounds and need further upgrading to produce specification fuels such as gasoline and fuel oil. (All of these liquid fuel production methods release carbon dioxide (CO2) in the conversion process, far more than is released in the extraction and refinement of liquid fuel production from petroleum. If these methods were adopted to replace declining petroleum supplies carbon dioxide emissions would be greatly increased on a global scale. For future liquefaction projects, Carbon dioxide sequestration is proposed to avoid releasing it into the atmosphere. As CO2 is one of the process streams, sequestration is easier than from flue gases produced in combustion of coal with air, where CO2 is diluted by nitrogen and other gases. )

The Fischer-Tropsch (F-T) process forms the basis for indirect liquefaction of coal. The process is indirect since the coal structure is completely broken down into synthesis gas by gasification with steam and oxygen. Then the synthesis gas is reacted over an appropriate F-T catalyst to form predominantly paraffinic liquid hydrocarbons having wide molecular weight.

This method was used to produce motor fuel during WWII and South Africa has used it to produce motor fuels and petrochemical feedstocks since the 1960s. The indirect route yields a large number of byproducts and overall has a lower thermal efficiency.

(but) Among commercially mature technologies, advantage for indirect coal liquefaction over direct coal liquefaction are reported by Williams and Larson (2003). Estimates are reported for sites in China where break-even cost for coal liquefaction may be in the range between 25 to 35 USD/barrel of oil.

...The CANMET Energy Technology Centre (CETC) in Ottawa, the energy science and technology arm of Natural Resources Canada..(showed)..that the simultaneous processing or co-processing of coal and oil sand BITUMEN - a combination of direct coal liquefaction and heavy oil upgrading - could be a viable and unique alternative for Alberta, where large reserves of these resources are found in close proximity. The research has also shown that co-processing is cheaper than direct coal liquefaction and, at high enough oil prices, more cost-effective than heavy oil upgrading.

From various web locations:

It also assumes that we can get the water that CTL plants require. Neither China nor the major coal producing parts of the US are going very well, water-wise. Or that the plants use dry cooling. But the water used by the chemical reactions themselves is rather modest. In some cases, the coal bed water is sufficient. Disposal of this water is a problem in parts of the US west, due to dissolved salts. But relative to agriculture, the Industrial processes actually uses minuscule amounts of water (aside from cooling, a temporary use of water without it contamination and with close to 100% recycling – similiar to the water use as heat sink ponds at nuclear plants). But most of the loss of water is to evaporation which then is precipitated - some locally soon after evaporation, but mostly far away. There would be other negative offsets in increased coal mining related deaths each year plus respiratory illness in the general population and toxic ground water if not regulated well. There may well be a trade off decision to be made between energy production and a local Agriculture drought, especially as coal is often found in water short areas of the world. The competition to liquidfied coal is cellulosic ethanol which has had to wait while we got the cost of enzymes down, which is now accomplished, but still requires research to tailor the enzymes to the particular biomass, and which needs a higher yield ( a 4% ethanol yield means we are using more energy than we get as fuel - Corn starches yield 15% or so - perhaps that is breakeven?)

Then, a number of threads in GD: Politics which pointed out much the same thing.

And now this.

Sorry, but the man is all hype and no substance and he is an idiot if he's in the pocket of the coal industry. Hate to come out against any Dem candidate but I can't find much to like about Obama right about now. :(

it`s high sulfur coal that can not be burned. since he is the senator from illinois he`s trying to bring jobs to this part of the state that is jobless. if the environment costs are not to high then i see the project going forward.

Coal mining is extremely dirty, routinely tears up terrain and leaves infertile moonscapes behind. As a career it's hazardous to life and lungs. And then the information that peak would be a generation away makes the whole idea look like a non-starter to me.

Admittedly it looks like a winning position in Montana. But Schweitzer has a different constituency than Obama.

Sugar tariffs supported by Obama are the main reason sugar-based ethanol is impractical in the US (sugar produces 8x as much ethanol per pound as corn).

How about making Illinois the leading sugar-ethanol producer? Bring jobs *and* make Illinois a leader in clean energy, instead of global warming?

the candy industry in chicago. chicago was once the biggest sugar and chocolate maker in the united states. now most of the candy is made in mexico

IIRC both Curtiss and Peter Paul were out of Chicago.

So by artificially-propping up prices we kill the industries they sell to. Total lack of foresight.

n/t

n/t

It's not so much an answer to green energy as it is an answer to transportation energy needs using the retail system that is in place,

Following the peak in oil production, everyone is going to be looking for liquid transportation fuel options, and this one is going to bubble to the top of the slag-heap. It's a "dubious" prospect from a number of points of view. The problems with mining have already been mentioned. There is also the problem that the few commercialized FT processes in use require natural gas as a feedstock along with coal. Then there is the problem of CO2 emissions from the process itself. Here is a commentary from Wikipedia on that problem:


Somebody needs to pull Mr. Obama out of the coal industry's pocket and give him a good smack upside the head.

I think they can channel that "shoot the opposition" sentiment into an expression that is less murderous.

"If I had a rocket launcher..."

We should institute a program to learn to make nuclear fusion practical. Unlike fission (used in today's atomic power plants), fusion reactors produce byproducts that are dangerous for hours or days (IIRC), rather than hundreds of thousands of years.

The program should be run like the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program - take a big bunch of our smartest engineers in their 20s, give them a little adult supervision (not too much), and lock them away somewhere with whatever resources they ask for. In a few years we'll have unlimited energy, extremely clean.

it seems like a no-brainer:

1) Help rid the world of fissionable material
2) Provide a virtually endless source of clean energy
3) Jobs, jobs, jobs

If only the resources devoted to the Iraq war had been channeled in that direction...

Sounds perfect. And nothing ever went wrong after the Manhattan Project and Apollo Program.

Fast spectrum reactors and nuclear fuel reprocessing would be a much better use of resources. The Integral Fast Reactor experiment used fuel such that that the radioactivity would decay to less than that of the original ore in 300-400 years. That technology needs to be scaled up.

which can be leaked into the environment, or used for weapons.

It's a better use of resources if you are only committing limited resources. Both the Apollo and Manhattan projects had virtually unlimited resources, and both were resounding successes.

n/t

depends on liquid fuel or better energy storage, neither of which we have right now.

but if we want to keep anything close to our current, usustainable lifestyle, we need more nuclear. nothing else will work in the short term to bridge the gap now thanks to our own inaction. but, i can absolutely gaurantee that we will just switch our dependence from oil to coal, and we will be able to watch the breakdown of our planet's ecosystems right before our own eyes.

sorry, rant off/

Dirty and destructive. Claiming it burns as "cleanly" as gasoline is no big plus in my book.

If we can't do better than this then we're in big trouble. (We're in big trouble)

It levels mountains, fills in streams, releases arsenic and other toxins. Is it worth the destruction?

I believe that biofuels need to be exploited to their maximum practical extent. But any energy infrastructure system would have to address periods of reduced production of these fuels. A system dependent on biofuels will be subject to crippling shortages during drought years without back-up systems. Can you imagine the effect of a ‘dust bowl’ series of years on a biofuel industry?

One way to mitigate would be to build a ‘strategic coal stockpile’ with mothballed liquefaction capacity ready to be put on line in the event of a shortfall. Mothballed capacity and stockpiles are not a part of a Laissez-faire system.

In the coming world of energy scarcity, the current ‘free-market’ dynamic will be incapable of providing a relatively stable energy supply. We will need a diverse, redundant and integrated energy infrastructure that will require planning and coordination far beyond what ‘market signals’ (ie: price) can provide.

We need to establish a USEA (U.S. Energy Authority) that provides centralized high-level planning, management and funding for the energy infrastructure.

Once we have established a USEA (U.S. Energy Authority) that provides centralized planning for the energy infrastructure, we can begin basing infrastructure development on an energy balance basis. This would hopefully avoid the building of inefficient systems, an example of which is the ethanol plant being built 7 mi. east of where I am now. This plant will burn coal to produce a liquid fuel with an EPR of 1 (corn ethanol) when you could produce a liquid fuel with an EPR of 5 from the coal directly, with the same carbon impact. A USEA could mandate that wind be used as the process energy for midwest corn ethanol, making corn ethanol an energy carrier for a renewable, but intermittent, energy source.


Using CTL as a primary liquid fuels supply is a mistake, from both a environmental and sustainability perspective. If we limit CTL to a back-up fuel source, and account for this carbon in the integrated energy plan, it should be manageable.


Of course, once we get things up and running smoothly, some GOP types will start screaming about how the 'strategic coal' CTL plants should be running to lower SUV go-juice prices, and will probably win.

But I can dream, can't I.

n/t

Somebody needs to sit this man down for a heart-to-heart talk with, maybe, AL GORE and watch An Inconvenient Truth.

I am appalled, and if this is the sort of program Obama supports then I can NEVER support him. Sorry.

Coal mining is not acceptable. A whole generation of men on one side of my family died of black lung and mining accidents. Coal cannot be mined safely.

This is just ignoring the core problem - we need to put our society on a more stable footing than relying on fossil fuels like coal. It certainly isn't going to happen very soon and fossil fuels might always have some part to play but we need to start dramatically reducing the use in any form Immediately. Turning to so called clean coal technologies is only keeping us on the wrong path and prolonging the problem.

I'm extremely disappointed that he's taken this direction. Makes me wonder what else he's going to compromise?

FT is what all serious environmentalists must fight.

It really will be the end of the world.

The Dream: Coal, liquefied by a new, inexpensive, high-efficiency, low-energy-input process, with all chemical, metallic, and radioactive toxins removed by other new, inexpensive, high-efficiency, low-energy-input processes, sold to a grateful market at low cost, competing with other cleaner renewable fuels (solar, wind, nuclear).

The Reality: Coal, liquefied by expensive, low-efficiency implementations of Fischer-Tropsch, with no toxin removal performed, still producing high levels of radioactive particulate matter, sold at the highest price the market will bear, taxed as heavily as the government can get away with, as cleaner renewable fuels (solar, wind, nuclear) remain starved for funds.

Oh, my. I forgot about carbon dioxide release. But the ecosphere won't.

--p!