The Post Gets Coal-Liquids Story Mostly Right
The Washington Post joined coal state newspapers in attacking Congressional plans to push liquid coal. An editorial yesterday, “Coal-to-Liquid Boondoggle: A risky solution to America’s energy woes” gets the story mostly right:
The most troubling aspect of CTL is that producing it will roughly double climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions.
That would be more accurate if “producing” were replaced by “producing and burning.” The story goes on to note that capturing and storing the emissions from CTL production is
so untested on a large scale that the Senate energy bill seeks to conduct demonstration projects across the country to answer some vital questions, such as whether the carbon dioxide, once stored in a variety of geological settings, will remain there.
And even if capture and storage works, you are still left with the greenhouse gas emissions from burning the fuel in vehicles.
The story does have one misleading item:
To wean the United States off of just 1 million barrels of the 21 million barrels of crude oil consumed daily, an estimated 120 million tons of coal would need to be mined each year. The process requires vast amounts of water, particularly a concern in the parched West. And the price of a plant is estimated at $4 billion.
The casual reader would be left with the distinct impression that $4 billion is the price tag for a 1 million barrel-a-day plant. In fact, $4.5 billion is the price tag for a 50,000-barrel-a-day facility (without capture and storage). Getting 1 million barrels a day of CTL would cost some 20 times that–upwards of $90 billion (with some savings from economies of scale). And remember, we import 11 million barrels a day.
CTL is a boondoggle. Kudos to the Post for saying so.
