Coal to oil conversion gaining interest in China, U.S.

High oil prices are spawning greater interest in technologies that convert coal into liquid fuel, according to an article published yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, but the shift could have a significant impact on the environment.

Heightened tensions in the Middle East combined with booming demand and political instability in other regions have put a premium on crude oil and forced China and the United States — the world’s largest energy gluttons — to look towards secure sources of fuel. Both countries are coal-rich but petroleum-poor.
“It’s far from clear… that the world would be better off — economically or environmentally — by burning more coal to fuel cars and trucks,” writes Patrick Barta, author of the article.

He notes that coal-to-oil plants are extremely expensive — “[a] single plant capable of producing about 80,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day — less than 0.5% of America’s daily oil diet — would cost an estimated $6 billion or more to build” — while there are serious environmental concerns about the process’s production of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas blamed for global warming, and other pollutants. Barta cites studies from the Natural Resources Defense Council, an American environmental group, that estimate the production and use of a gallon of liquid fuel originating from coal emits about 80 percent more carbon dioxide than the production and use of other fuels — gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel — derived from crude oil. Barta reports that “some boosters of the coal-to-oil plants describe them as carbon-dioxide factories that produce energy on the side” but that it may be possible to significantly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by building new plants that use technologies to trap and store carbon dioxide during the production process.

Mongabay