No Matter How Much Coal You Stick Up Congress’ Ass, You Still Aren’t Getting a Diamond
Once again, the shameless milking of the government for pointless and wasteful energy subsidies in the name of “energy independence” makes me doubt the virtues of representative democracy, for distinctly un-Caplanian reasons.
Why is “energy independence” this supposed goal of foreign policy. Is it to defang Iran, thinking that the US government handing out goodies for coal is going to change their behavior. Perhaps it’s too make Russia less aggressive on the world stage, despite the fact that it’s most direct geopolitical influence comes from its large stock of nuclear weapons and natural gas that it exports to Europe. Or, do we pursue “energy independence” to provide:
loan guarantees for six to 10 major coal-to-liquid plants, each likely to cost at least $3 billion; a tax credit of 51 cents for every gallon of coal-based fuel sold through 2020; automatic subsidies if oil prices drop below $40 a barrel; and permission for the Air Force to sign 25-year contracts for almost a billion gallons a year of coal-based jet fuel.
One may ask, in a world where people are conscious of the harm carbon emissions can do, why are the two parties uniting around coal, which for all you chemistry buffs, is a solid hunk o’ carbon, just waiting to get burned and released into the atmosphere. Well, just because various states and regions have been bilking the federal government for years to no good effect, doesn’t mean law makers have grown any more weary of such proposals, instead they’ve just gotten better at selling this snake-oil, err, liquefied coal.
But the scale of proposed subsidies for coal could exceed those for any alternative fuel, including corn-based ethanol. …
Coal industry executives insist their fuel can actually be cleaner than oil, because they would capture the gas produced as the liquid fuel is being made and store it underground. Some could be injected into oil fields to push oil to the surface. Several aspiring coal-to-liquid companies say that they would reduce greenhouse emissions even further by using renewable fuels for part of the process
This sounds like total bullshit, right, how on earth can burning coal ever reduce emissions, or even just pump as much carbon ito the atmosphere as petroleum. Well, you’re right, it is total bullshit.
Coal-to-liquid fuels produce almost twice the volume of greenhouse gases as ordinary diesel. In addition to the carbon dioxide emitted while using the fuel, the production process creates almost a ton of carbon dioxide for every barrel of liquid fuel..
The M.I.T. team expressed even more skepticism about the economic risks. It estimated that it would cost $70 billion to build enough plants to replace 10 percent of American gasoline consumption.
The study estimates that the construction costs for coal-to-liquid plants are almost four times higher than the costs for comparable petroleum refineries, and it argues that cost estimates for synthetic fuel plants in the past turned out to be “wildly optimistic.”
In a new report last week, the Energy Department estimated that a plant capable of making 50,000 barrels of liquefied coal a day — a tiny fraction of the nearly 9 million barrels in gasoline burned daily in the United States — would cost $4.5 billion.
In other words, it would be more environmentally sound and we’d save if money if we just subsidized the building of more oil power plants and gasoline refineries. There’s one condition where I’d be OK with this bill passing, if it came along with a carbon tax. Why not screw over these assholes from extorting money from the government for no discernible public good besides handouts to their regions (its no surprise that the main proponents of this bill come from states that end in “Virginia”. Even Obama is in on board with this travesty, which is just shameful. This debacle is yet another case of why enacting serious measures against climate change in the US is going to be awfully difficult. I guess that’s another reason to support Richardson, who managed to give his keynote energy policy speech without saying “ethanol” or “coal.”
Now, I don’t think any candidates have proposed the Whippersnapper energy plan. A carbon tax, subsidies for China to build nuclear power plants, fast tracking nuclear power plants here, stop subsidizing and protecting corn ethanol, allowing tariff free importation of sugar ethanol from Brazil, increased mileage standards and…. algae based biodiesel!
One final note about coal-to-liquid fuels. They’ve only been used on a wide-scale in Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa. Coincidence…I think not.
Known as the Fischer-Tropsch process, the technology dates to the 1920s. It was used by Germany during World War II and by South Africa during the apartheid era,
UPDATE: I didn’t know about this until after I wrote this post, but Brad Plumer has a sweet article on TNR.com on the liquefied coal boondoggle. Despite it’s considerable merits, he doesn’t call liquefied coal advocates Nazis, which is why I get all the readers, right?
heheh. This liquified coal idea strikes me as needing a tag line: The Final Solution. Or Hitler’s Bequest.
Obama is for it because southern Illinois is (or was?) chock-full of relatively low grade coal, just waiting to be turned into votes as the land is turned into a moonscape.
I’m not against subsidies to get promising technologies jump-started as alternative energy sources, but the liquified coal, tar-sands petroleum, and nuclear power plants are all expensive non-cures for what ailes us. (Nuclear isn’t good because we don’t know what to do with the spent fuel that is radioactive for 10’s of thousands of years, and uranium will reach peak production real soon now too.)
So these are not promising alternatives if your goal is sustainable, non-global-warming, non-radio-hazardous technologies. But they each have their business supporters ready to line up at the subsidy trough (along with some think tank wonks that also feed at a similar thoughs provided by industry group’s contributions.)
JimPortlandOR
May 29, 2007 at 9:22 am
There are hundreds of clean, inexpensive, and free energy sources that have been suppressed for a total of a hundred years or more. Patents have been bought out, shelved, ignored, etc etc etc. A 10-minute google search will reveal dozens upon dozens of practical energy solutions already available which do not entail toxic emissions of either hydrocarbons or radioactivity. A few minutes more research will reveal cars that run on water, carburators that get 60 to 90 MPG, hydrogen processes that create far more energy than they use, and dozens of other technological advances, all of which remain deliberately ignored and thus underfunded and underdeveloped for the purposes of maintaining the real and effective monopolies enjoyed by the owners of the present systems. Cheney and Bush have no interest in anything other than pleasing their backers, who have no interest in anything which does not make them the most money at the greatest expense to everyone else in every way, including massive medical problems caused by energy byproduct toxiocitys which then create additional profits for the health “care” “industry”, and, naturally, resource wars which then create a market for the weapons manufacturers and “defense” “industry”. As a side benefit, Cheney and Bush get to wave our flag and wipe their asses with our Constitution, impress everyone with their patriotism and how big and brave they are, spy on everyone and everything, and use our media to frighten everyone over “the terrorists”, whom Bonzo Reagan sent $51 million dollars worth of Jihadist texbooks glorifying terrorism. When you understand that amoral unelected criminals whom you never see, let alone the amoral never elected criminals who steal our “free and fair elections” run everything and think of you merely as their slaves to be “farmed” for their profit, manipulation and entertainment, then you will understand the actual truth about both U.S. parties, and all nations in general. All of them are controlled, funded, and pitted against each other by the globalist corporatist criminals who haven’t the slightest interest, care, worry or concern for anyone or anything other than their own racist notions, their own power, and their own profit. Look at things this way for while, and you will begin to see one big interlocking profit machine designed to benefit a tiny group of the wealthiest few percent at the direct expense of everyone else, because that is exactly the reality of things.
=*=
May 29, 2007 at 10:43 am
[...] No Matter How Much Coal You Stick Up Congress’ Ass, You Still Aren’t Getting a Diamond Once again, the shameless milking of the government for pointless and wasteful energy subsidies in the name of […] [...]
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May 29, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Researchers have been working (with government money) for many years to liquefy coal affordably. You’d think they’d have some kind of “working model” right now. The fact that they DON’T suggests to me that this whole Coal-to-liquid thing will never really come through. Meanwhile, the cooking-oil-to-deisel engine is working RIGHT NOW and people can refine the cooking oil in their basements!!!
I think the Fossil Fuel people are grasping at straws. But we’ll see, I guess.
Mar-Garet
May 30, 2007 at 8:11 am
[...] His solution is that “Congress to pass a law requiring that all new cars sold (not just made, but sold) in the U.S. be flex-fueled — that is, be able to run on any combination of gasoline or alcohol fuels.” When he says “alcohol fuels” he means Ethanol. You know, that government subsidized boondoggle that is causing a spike in food prices, deforestation and which emits even more GWGs than gasoline. He wants to mandate that we use even more ethanol to pursue the phony goal of energy independence. Zubrin’s wacko energy worldview gets worse when he starts using the “c” word: coal, and talking about “enriching America’s miners.” He means liquefied coal, which is not only expensive to produce but also absolutely awful for the environment. [...]
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