Message #590 From:
TheMachine Date: March 24, 2008 07:03:49 AM
Not so clean energy
Posted on March 24, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized |
by Willy Ritch
I studiously avoid writing about certain so-called “clean” energy technologies that aren’t really all that clean. (Corn-based ethanol,
for example.) But in the spirit of know thine enemy it’s probably a
good idea to point out a bad idea when I see one. One such bad idea is
efforts by the Air Force to started using massive amounts of
coal-to-liquid (CTL) fuel.
The Air Force has offered up 700 acres
of land near a base in Montana to anyone who would like to roll into
town and build a CTL refinery. The land is the cheap part, however. A
plant like the Air Force would like to see would cost something like $5
billion. The Air Force sees it as a national security issue–weaning
themselves from a dependence on foreign oil:
‘’We’re going
to be burning fossil fuels for a long time, and there’s three times as
much coal in the ground as there are oil reserves,'’ said Air Force
Assistant Secretary William Anderson. ‘’Guess what? We’re going to burn
coal.”
CTL technology involves super heating coal in an oxygen starved
environment so it doesn’t actually burn. The coal gives off a gas and
then a catalyst is introduced that causes the gas turn into a form of
diesel fuel. It’s not new–the Nazis developed it in WWII to fuel their
tanks when they couldn’t get their hands on oil. The problem is that
unless a lot of the CO2 is captured and stored during the manufacturing
process CTL fuels have about twice the carbon footprint of regular old,
straight-out-of-the-ground oil. Carbon capture and storage (CSS) has
great promise, but even if some day it does reduce the greenhouse gas
emitted by a CTL plant, we’re still talking about coal. You know, coal
that has to be mined and transported at significant environmental expense…not to mention the high price that coal miners pay in health and safety.
Of course, the coal industry has a powerful lobby in Congress and
they can put pressure on the Air Force to embrace CTL technology. And
maybe it even makes some kind of sense from a national security
perspective. But not from an environmental one.
Wind, solar, geothermal, fuel cell technology…there are a lot of
legitimate sources of truly clean energy. And you can have some of that
energy delivered straight to you house. Find out how.
