Coal-to-Liquid Is a Boondoggle

“We are simply running out of time to avoid catastrophic warming, and we no longer have the luxury of grossly misallocating capital and fuels to expensive boondoggles like coal to liquid,” Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Joe Romm told the House Science and Technology Subcommittee on Energy and Environment yesterday. Proponents claim that coal-to-liquid technologies can reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

Romm emphasized that “Congress should only promote those [energy] strategies that promote net societal benefits.” Coal-to-liquid is not one of those strategies. The environmental harm it would cause is not worth the additional fuel, and when Congress implements effective carbon caps, the process may simply fade from economic viability.
Coal-to-liquid technology liquefies coal into conventional fuel for diesel, jet, or car engines. The process itself is expensive, and it also requires large energy inputs that are often derived from fossil fuels that release C02, along with large water inputs. This costly process produces gasoline that releases C02 when it is burned.

From production to combustion, CTL fuel could release as much as 2.5 times as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere as conventional diesel fuel, according to an analysis by the Argonne National Laboratory cited by David Hawkins of the National Resources Defense Council.

Coal-to-liquid advocates point to Carbon Capture and Sequestration technology as the solution to minimize additional greenhouse gas emissions created during the conversion process. But CCS technologies are not yet in use on large industrial scales, and Romm warned that, “there is no evidence whatsoever that this country is serious about CCS.” Carbon dioxide captured during the carbon-to-liquid process could be pumped into saline aquifers and other geologic formations for indefinite storage, or into depleted oil wells, forcing out unreachable stores of oil, which refiners could then turn into additional fuel. From the perspective of reducing greenhouse emissions, Romm pointed out that at the end of the latter process, “you’ve accomplished nothing.”

Even with CCS, the emissions from coal to liquid could still be 19 percent higher than conventional fuels. These emission levels, Romm explained, will not get us to the 60 to 80 percent reductions all industrialized nations need to make by 2050 in order to curb the effects of global warming.

American Progress