Peak Oil News and Message Boards

seahorse3 wrote:SASOL is a South African company turning coal to fuel developed during Apartheid. Not sure what method they use, but they are publicly traded. So, it can and is being done.

AirlinePilot wrote:...
There's 13 times as much energy in coal (in the form of the thorium in it) as there is available from burning the coal...

AirlinePilot wrote:

There is no reasonable alternative to liquid hydrocarbons for personal transportation. This path is neither pie-in-the-sky or mathematically challenged.

MD wrote:

AirlinePilot wrote:...
There's 13 times as much energy in coal (in the form of the thorium in it) as there is available from burning the coal...

I'm having a hard time overcoming my skepticism on this one.

JRP3 wrote:

AirlinePilot wrote:

There is no reasonable alternative to liquid hydrocarbons for personal transportation. This path is neither pie-in-the-sky or mathematically challenged.

Those of us driving electric vehicles every day realize how false that statement is. There is plenty of Thorium available without mining more coal, which we should be curtailing, not increasing. Coal mining itself is highly destructive and polluting.

The United States could eliminate the need for crude oil by using a combination of coal, natural gas and non-food crops to make synthetic fuel, a team of Princeton researchers has found.

Besides economic and national security benefits, the plan has potential environmental advantages. Because plants absorb carbon dioxide to grow, the United States could cut vehicle greenhouse emissions by as much as 50 percent in the next several decades using non-food crops to create liquid fuels, the researchers said.

Synthetic fuels would be an easy fit for the transportation system because they could be used directly in automobile engines and are almost identical to fuels refined from crude oil. That sets them apart from currently available biofuels, such as ethanol, which have to be mixed with gas or require special engines.



Accomplishing this would not be easy or quick, Floudas said. A realistic approach would call for a gradual implementation of synthetic fuel technology, and Floudas estimated it would take 30 to 40 years for the United States to fully adopt synthetic fuel. It also would not be cheap. He estimates the price tag at roughly $1.1 trillion for the entire system.

The research makes up an important part of a white paper recently produced by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), the nation's largest chemical engineering association. In the paper, the chemical engineers call for a greater integration of energy sources and urge policymakers to consider chemical conversion processes as a potential method to produce cleaner and cheaper fuels.

"Right now we are going down so many energy paths," said June Wispelwey, the institute's director and a 1981 Princeton alumna. "There are ways for the system to be more integrated and much more efficient."


"The main reason we wrote the paper was to get the planning agencies -- the national academies, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Defense Department -- thinking about this," Weekman said. He added that it was important that the agencies consider "this key link of using chemical processes to produce conventional fuels."

In the Princeton research, Floudas' team found that synthetic fuel plants could produce gasoline, diesel and aviation fuels at competitive prices, depending on the price of crude oil and the type of feedstock used to create the synthetic fuel. About two-thirds of crude oil consumed by the United States is used for transportation fuel, according to the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA). The EIA said the United States imports about 45 percent of its annual crude oil consumption.

"Even including the capital costs, synthetic fuels can still be profitable," said Richard Baliban, a chemical and biological engineering graduate student who graduated in 2012 and was the lead author on several of the team's papers. "As long as crude oil is between $60 and $100 per barrel, these processes are competitive depending on the feedstock," he said.

The core of the plan is a technique that uses heat and chemistry to create gasoline and other liquid fuels from high-carbon feedstock ranging from coal to switchgrass, a native North American grass common to the Great Plains. The method, called the Fischer-Tropsch process, was developed in Germany in the 1920s as a way to convert coal to liquid fuels.

Cloud9 wrote:The Germans ran their war machine on synthetics. Production never met demand. Vehicles were abandoned on the battle field for lack of fuel.