The Coking of America — Jun 19th 2007

By Alexia Prichard

"It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it... It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever, and never got uncoiled."
--Hard Times, Charles Dickens


At the moment, a bill promoting "Coal-to-Liquid" (CTL) is quietly making its way through Congress. As its name suggests, CTL uses a chemical process to convert coal into a liquid, which can then be further converted into fuel for cars and planes. In an age when alternatives to petroleum are being hotly pursued, coal seems to make sense--especially given the huge reserves in this country. But it doesn't.

Coal production is twice as polluting as petroleum production, and accounts for more than half of the nation's deadly greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, to build the 5-10 proposed new plants necessary for CTL conversion would cost more than $3 billion per plant. Add to that the proposed daily output of 50,000 barrels of liquified coal--in a country that currently burns 9 million barrels of gasoline per day--and you have math so stunning you feel like you should look over your shoulder to see if you're on Candid Camera.

Paradoxically, CTL fans argue that the process can be a "green" alternative, thanks to carbon sequestration (also known as carbon capture and storage-CCS). This entails capturing the CO2 as it's emitted and storing it underground via a long injection tube or some other costly method. But here too, there are major drawbacks: the costs dramatically outweigh the gains, and there isn't enough data to determine whether carbon sequestration is harmful or not. One of the few such large-scale operations in the world is Norway's Sleipner West project in the North Sea, which has only been around since 1996-not even an embryo in science years.

CTL supporters the world over insist that safe, nearly impenetrable areas can be found underground or undersea that would hold the CO2 for "at least" few thousand years. The tricky word here is "nearly." What happens if there's a fluke earthquake? A rogue missile? If a hole is punched in the protective layer above the sequestered CO2, we'll be right back where we started: dying from an excess of greenhouse gases.

How dumb do coal proponents in the government think we are? Pretty dumb, clearly, since we're not supposed to notice that three of the bill's co-sponsors in the Senate come from among the top five states in coal reserves: West Virgina (Byrd-D), Wyoming (Enzi-R & Thomas-R), and Illinois (Obama-D). Essentially, we'd be throwing money and effort at CTL to avoid shutting down the coal industry--a decision some fearmongers say could cause a global economic disaster.

Well, I think that's silly and I'll tell you why: we can adapt. We built a country on our ability to adapt, and we can do it again. We can try proven, economically responsible alternatives like solar, wind, biomass, and biofuel, and easily avoid disaster while reducing our CO2 emissions at the same time. We just need to give these cleaner alternatives a fighting chance. Truly "green" energy-usage percentages are low because the government hasn't thrown its weight behind these alternatives. So what's it going to be: spend even more of the money we don't have on wildly expensive, untested, low-output systems, or spend much, much less on proven, efficient, lasting systems? The answer may mean no less than the fate of the world.

Tags: coal, congress, environment, green, obama, petroleum

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