The plug-in technology is ready, the sunlight to electricity technology is ready, electric efficiency technology is ready, and the algae biodiesel technology is in development. We don’t lack in sunlight to fuel our needs. All we lack is the leadership to make it happen.

My response to your story is posted on my blog at: http://cleancoalfuels.com/blogs/?p=12.

The bottom-line: We CAN reduce and/or eliminate the carbon footprint from coal-derived synthetic fuels, and your continued willful omission of this fact is doing supreme disservice to your supposed mission of addressing in a real way the challenges posed to us by climate change.

In fact, given that there is not one single commercial CTL plant with biomass and CCS — and given that such a plant would be far more complicated, expensive, and risky than plain old CTL — you’ll just have to excuse my disbelief that such plants will become the cornerstone of this new industry.

In any case, if it becomes practical and economic to gasify a significant amount of biomass with coal and then capture and store the carbon, it is very safe to say analytically that a MUCH better use of the biomass (and the convenient permanent global geologic repositories for CO2) is to make negative-carbon electricity rather than zero-carbon liquid fuel.

CTL is not part of a strategy to achieve 450 ppm. It is part of a strategy to stay addicted to liquid fossil fuels.

Biomass gasification is also not theoretical. It is being done in Europe as we speak, at commercial scale. Every day equipment suppliers are working on new gasification technologies to more easily and efficiently utilize and process biomass into a feedstock for industrial gasification.

Saying that it cant/wont be done because of the fact that biomass gasification and CCS is not running today in the same plant is a technically invalid argument. Each component is running today in separate facilities, and the technologies are fully compatible. There is no reason whatsoever that these processes cannot be economically and efficiently combined in the same plant.

Your assertion that these plants are too expensive, risky, and complicated does not hold water. These technologies do add an element of complexity and cost to the project, but it is not nearly so severe of a factor that it compromises project viability.
We are talking about maybe a 10-15% increase in capital costs, and a bit of an increase in operating costs. Certainly not enough to compromise the economic viability of the project given the current oil prices. Given the major permitting uncertainties that are beginning to be introduced by the early stages of carbon regulation, I would argue that it is actually a substantial project risk NOT to be considering deployment of these technologies, as it substantially increases the probability of years of litigation of permit applications, or even outright denial of the project permits. Compared to those risks, IMO the risks of biomass and CCS pale in comparison.

And to address the “even if we could, we shouldn’t” aspect of your argument, I could not disagree more wholly or vigorously.

The pathway you argue for, clean renewable electricity production (whether biomass gasification, wind, solar or other) ultimately being used for transportation, is an admirable vision, and one which I see unfolding progressively as we slowly get viable electrical vehicle technology that is commercially available. This path should be pursued and encouraged. If you are right, and it is that much more efficient, then ultimately we will have no demand for our liquid fuels after all of the vehicles transition over to cheaper electrical power. When that day arrives, we can retire the fuels portion of these plants, and produce power from the same process equipment by just directing the biomass derived syngas or hydrogen over to a turbine or a fuel cell. I welcome that day, as efficiency and delivery of clean energy is truly my goal.

BUT, I do not think any rational person can really believe that the far-down-the-road potential to transition our economy to clean electricity is an acceptable reason to choose not to produce clean transportation fuels NOW, in an economically viable and climate-friendly manner. You are kidding yourself if you think we are going to quickly and suddenly stop using liquid transportation fuels.

So what you are really arguing is that because the solution is only good, not theoretically perfect, we ought not to do it, and instead of producing and using in existing infrastructure hundreds of millions of gallons of clean carbon neutral transportation fuels, thereby economically and realistically producing a dramatic reduction to global carbon emissions, we ought to pack it up, go build some wind turbines, and hope that eventually they might make vehicles that can run on that power.

That is a bad argument. Even from a climate standpoint. But there are even more issues to consider here.

I wish we had the luxury of only looking at the situation through the climate lens. Unfortunately, Peak Oil is also a pressing issue. One which if left unaddressed is likely to take a much larger toll on overall human health and well being much sooner than climate change. Looking at either issue, Peak Oil or Climate Change, to the exclusion of the other is to invite conclusions on the shape of future energy infrastructure that will lead to disastrous consequences if those conclusions are followed to their logical end without considering the relational impacts on the other issue.

You say that this is “part of a strategy to stay addicted to liquid fossil fuels”. Done right, that could not be further from the truth. These plants can be designed to ultimately transition to 100% biomass operation using the right type of gasification and front-end processing. A true BTL process. This means that a responsibly developed gasification and FT synthetic fuels plant not only can deliver immediately a real reduction in lifecycle carbon emissions, but also it DOES NOT ULTIMATELY COMMIT US TO A FOSSIL FUELS PATH. Instead, it can help act as a true bridge solution, leveraging our endowment of low-cost fossil fuels sources to help build the infrastructure that will ultimately run on renewables.

Like it or not, done right CTL-based synthetic fuels, or more accurately BCTL+CCS (Biomass and Coal to Liquids plus Carbon Capture and Sequestration), can be not only be a part, but even a cornerstone, of a strategy to achieve 450PPM carbon stabilization.

I would make the argument that it can even be delivered on a larger scale and more quickly than through conversion of electrical infrastructure, as these plants are viable on a 100% carbon neutral basis now, at today’s oil prices, and carry much larger margins than electricity production. Do not make the mistake of confusing electrical energy as a product with liquid fuels as a product. Or the relative economics of the conversion of a given feedstock to each of these products. If you take the BTU content of one ton of coal, or an equivalent BTU content of biomass, and convert it to electricity, you get $75 worth of product. If you convert those same BTUs in feedstock to liquid fuels you can get $200+ worth of product).

That is why economics of reduced carbon fuels may work when the economics of gasification+CCS electricity generation are far more challenged.

The one and only argument you have made here that actually holds up is that the ability to do this does not guarantee its implementation or acceptance.

This is also the point that I most want to you and your colleagues in the environmental community to stop, and think very very carefully about, as here is also where you have the opportunity to either choose to be part of the problem, or part of the solution.

Right now you are actively undermining your own credibility by making technically inaccurate arguments against the development of a synthetic fuels industry, hoping instead for eventual development of some theoretically more efficient future approach.

You are letting the perfect get in the way of the good.

Instead, you can choose to look objectively at the technology and the studies, and admit that we DO have a viable technical path here, and instead of committing so much time and energy to trying to block the entire industry as a whole, can instead do your best to encourage responsible development. That is a noble task in indeed.

Don’t like CTL without CCS? Great. Make us do it. No problem. Think it’s important that we produce fuels with a lower lifecycle footprint than conventional petro-diesel? Great! Make that case.

By doing that, you are being part of the solution, encouraging responsible development, and remaining true to your mission of reducing carbon emissions and trying to get to stabilization by 450 PPM.

Your current course has you producing a very large amount of what I would call “friendly fire”. There ARE those of us in the industry that are being proactive in reducing lifecycle carbon emissions.

If you set the standard, industry can either aim at and hit it economically, or not. Either way, you have pursued the course of intellectual honesty, and supported and enhanced your mission of a reduction in global carbon emissions.

The alternative, which is what you are currently doing, is by intentionally spreading misinformation or disinformation by incorrectly stating that all coal-derived synthetic fuels have catastrophic climate impacts, you (and the NRDC and others) are not only just flat-out lying about enormous the potential of these fuels to be part of the climate solution. You are actually in effect making the problem of climate change worse, by slowing down and hurting those of us who are attempting to pursue and implement real and presently deployable large-scale solutions to this problem.

Part of the solution, or part of the problem? The choice is yours.

- Stephen

I used Tilman’s LIHD figure of 18.1 GJ/ha and came up with 709,000 sq. mi. for biomass to electricity and then powering efficient electric vehicles. Liquid powered vehicles would be much less efficient, and so take more land area (e.g. over 2,000,000 sq. mi. of prairie). Unless you’re talking only about sub-10% biomass (at which point it is really just coal), there isn’t enough land to do what you suggest.

There are 1,000,000 sq. mi. of prairie land in the U.S., so the biomass electricity thing is possible, but it is of course unreasonable to use all of our land to power our vehicles: most should remain for habitat.

In another thread in this blog

http://climateprogress.org/ 2007/ 12/ 29/ bill-mckibben-james-hansen-350-ppm/

I asked about the hypothetical effects of letting our oil supplies run out without any efforts to reduce; how long that would take, what the climate effects would be. But nobody wanted to tackle my questions.

You tossed out the figure of 50 years. Is this accurate?

Assuming the validity of the AGW hypothesis, one could take a time frame of 50 years until the end of oil as good news.

Certainly we would still have coal for quite a while longer (how long? by the way), but it seems to me that dwindling oil would force the hands of those in the oil-dependent industries to switch gears without government interference.

Does this make any sense? Can you help clarify this?

The transition to electric vehicles will be through plug-in hybrids. At first, the PHEVs will have 20 miles of electric range, then 40, then 60. Even powering 20% of our VMT with biofuels looks difficult because of land area, but biodiesel from algae uses the least land area of all the biofuels, and it might be feasible. (Algae is still 7 to 41 times the land area of CSP, but that is much better than the 392 times of LIHD biodiesel.)

I have another question for you: let’s presume that underground storage space for CO2 is finite. Do you think that coal electricity with CCS powering EVs or CTL with CCS powering liquid fueled vehicles uses up that finite storage space faster?

Miscanthus does not grow the same in Oregon as it does in Illinois. Different crops have vastly different efficiencies in terms of inputs vs outputs. ETC.

I have the luxury of not looking at it through a nationwide lens for the moment. My plant is in central-eastern Illinois.

Let me start by saying that the best biomass sources are waste sources, as they do not cary any land footprint impacts, and they usually help prevent downstream pollution in some way. That is our first choice for biomass feedstock, but the total supply is limited.

In terms of agricultural sources, the most efficient that I have found for our area is Miscanthus. http://miscanthus.uiuc.edu/ I am working with the UIUC folks to get better data on the fuel requirements for miscanthus agriculture, but all appearances indicate that this is the most efficient primary agricultural biomass alternative. It carries added benefits of being noninvasive, requiring planting only once, and most importantly, requiring no pesticides, herbicides, or nitrogen fertilizers beyond the initial crop establishment year. All the farmer has to do is go out, harvest it, and transport to the plant for processing.

They are seeing yields of about 15 tons per acre per year in the test plots. even out the BTU content, and you get the equivilent of growing about 10.4 tons per acre per year of Illinois coal (with substantial topsoil, biodiversity, nitrogen runoff, and other improvements vs corn agriculture).

Gasification and FT yields about 2 barrels of fuel per ton of coal.

10.4*2*42=approx 873.6 gallons per acre per year of diesel and jet fuels.

To supply our whole plant would require roughly 412,000 acres.

Those fuels would have a very high energy return on energy investment, but I cannot quantify that at present without better data on the fuel requirements of growing the feedstock (which are known to be very low, but i dont have the numbers).

This works spectacularly well for central and southern Illinois, and many other regions of the US, but not for everywhere.

Add to that, because of project technical risk constraints, we have to start off with a coal blend, and add the biomass over time to establish a known technical track record of gasification of that type of biomass beyond a certain blend. 100% biomass is a lot more difficult than 50% biomass with the present state of technology (not to mention the sheer logistical challenges of getting that much biomass production started up all at one time).

Add to that, miscanthus would cost about $60/ton delivered maybe a bit more thanks to corn prices. This works economically at present oil prices, but adds over $100,000,000/year to feedstock costs versus coal at a 100% biomass feed. Carbon regulation can help dramatically to level this playing field.

In terms of the “higher use” for underground storage space, I believe any use that gets carbon out of the atmosphere is good enough given that the experts tell us we need to be doing this about everywhere within the next 50 years, which is absolutely light speed for turning over the entire capital stock of global energy generation facilities.

You would be surprised how little space that CO2 plume actually takes up when injected. I have seen the numbers for the Futuregen project (which is only about 30 miles from our project site in Illinois) and it is actually pretty surprising how large the carbon sink capacity that the experts indicate is.

Theoretically, you can get more vehicle miles out of EVs for the given energy input at the plant level, but I cant buy an EV at the local Toyota dealership (yet). Until I an every other person in the US can, then it is at best a purely academic discussion, because as a developer I cannot influence availability of EVs. I CAN produce reduced or neutral carbon footprint diesel and jet fuels. There is also the added problem that nobody wants to pay for carbon neutral power. Oil prices are high and rising, and I can make money in that business (meaning I can get the infrastructure built). We need higher power prices to make widespread deployment of IGCC+CCS gasification power generation economically viable.

Oh, and EV aircraft dont work for passenger travel because of energy density and weight issues.

When I cant find a market for my diesel because everyone is demanding electricity, then I will switch to making electricity, but for now, trying to wish that pathway of producing energy and converting it to vehicle miles into existence is a waste of precious time (dont get me wrong, it should be pursued vigerously) when we can be making a carbon neutral, clean domestic source of fuels that works with the existing infrastructure. The clock is ticking, both on peak oil and on climate change.

For now, we need bridge infrastructure. A LOT OF IT. We need it to be clean. And we need it to be generally compatible with an eventual transition to renewables and more highly efficient end users (EV vs ICE). Gasification and FT does that better any other alternative I have seen.

- Stephen

In terms of the broader issue of CTL+CCS, I think we need to keep questions of public policy separate from individual business decisions. An individual business can do something positive for the environment, but at the same time it might not be sound public policy to promote that activity if it cannot scale up. So, for example a carbon-negative biomass solution may be a good thing to do for 1% of our transportation, but if it cannot get above 10%, then I question whether public policy shouldn’t look elsewhere for solutions (though not hinder the business that is looking for a small niche).

Using waste sources is an especially good thing, but probably the least scalable, and I would worry about not returning the waste to the fields to keep them fertile.

If you are looking at Miscanthus, you should read this article:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/314/5805/1598.pdf
It claims that high-diversity plots showed three times the productivity of Panicum virgatum, and I assume Miscanthus is similar to that. It is also worthwhile checking out the supplementary materials online:
http://www.sciencemag.org/ cgi/ content/ full/ sci;314/ 5805/ 1598/ DC1

I made an estimate of the land area required to fuel 2005 U.S. car transportation that was as generous as I could reasonably be to biofuels. Here is what I came up with:
http://www.killian.com/earl/BioFuelLand.html
Note that this spreadsheet does not include the land area to grow the inputs to growing the crops listed therein. One might add factors over 2 in land area for that, but it is hard to do that calculation right (EROI is too crude, IMO). (One advantage of Tilman’s stuff is that the inputs are so low.) Even with this enormous optimism (not counting inputs), biofuels look problematic.

My lack of enthusiasm for biofuels results from the extremely large land areas required to produce these fuels as shown in the above spreadsheet. Basically, taking a step through plants introduces great inefficiency.

I do see a need for liquid fuels (e.g. jet fuel, and certain long-distance freight, back-up fuel for plug-in hybrids), and I believe that we may find plants useful in producing these fuels for a while. The land area required for just these uses is enormous by itself. We certainly don’t want to add in competition from transportation that can be done so much more efficiently.

I have been ignoring the coal portion of CTL+CCS and concentrating on the biomass portion only because I don’t see any value in coal CTL+CCS. The CCS just brings liquid fuels produced this way down almost, but not quite, to the level of petroleum gasoline and diesel, doesn’t it? After all, no one is proposing tailpipe CCS, and so if the carbon atoms in the tank come from a fossil (e.g. coal), they are added to the atmosphere. Without the newly grown plant carbon added, CTL has no value.