Liquid coal means liquid problems

I haven’t been posting as much as I usually do, since I have been preparing testimony for the Congressional hearing on Wednesday. The committee has finally posted details of the hearing here. It should be a rousing debate. At least I won’t be all alone on the anti-CTL side.

In the course of preparing, one of Climate Progress’s readers sent me some high-quality information on the high level of water use in the liquid coal process, which I though I’d share. The key factoid is five to seven gallons of water are necessary for every gallon of diesel fuel that’s produced (and double that if you coproduce diesel fuel and electricity from coal).

This comes from a very useful report: “Emerging Issues for Fossil Energy and Water” by DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory. The key chart is (click on it for a clearer image):

ctl-figure2.jpg

GPM is gallons per minute, Bgal is billions of gallon, BPSD is barrels per steam day (whatever a “steam day” is), and I think 42 gallons per barrel (that’s what it is for oil, anyway). Ed Markey (D-MA) put this all in layman’s language on Grist:

Liquid coal is also incredibly expensive and resource-intensive to create, with small returns compared to the amount of energy and the immense number of new industrial plants needed to create it. Even setting aside the environmental impacts of coal mining, the water resources needed for this sort of undertaking would be staggering: 4.6 billion gallons per year of liquid fuels from coal would require between 21 and 60 billion gallons of water per year. To give some perspective, 60 billion gallons could fill 90,850 Olympic sized swimming pools.

There has been much buzz that new CTL processes would use less water. The hearing’s CTL/water expert — Dr. Richard D. Boardman, The Secure Energy Initiative Head, Idaho National Laboratory, Idaho Falls, ID — will hopefully clear that up.

The bottom line is that CTL is not a particularly smart long-term strategy for a nation and a world facing mega-droughts and chronic water shortages from human-caused climate change.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 31st, 2007 at 4:06 pmand is filed under Climate Progress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Liquid coal means liquid problems”

  1. john Says:
    August 31st, 2007 at 4:28 pm

    The other bummer for CTL is the amount of carbon generated per unit of useful energy obtained. Estimates vary, but something on the order of twice as much as gasoline is typical. And the cost of any reliable sequestration of process-related carbon generated makes the whole thing kind of silly.

    As for a steam day? Might be the kind of weather you could expect if you start using this stuff.

  2. James Smith Says:
    April 3rd, 2008 at 4:15 am

    Lets compare apples to apples. Liquid coal is NOT gasoline, it is Diesel and Kerosene(Jet Fuel ) Japans Auto makers will produce 200.000 diesel powered cars for europe in 2008. Sure, the ways to eliminate CO2 will be expensive. Is that not better than fighting wars for cheap oil.

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