Rest In Peace, old friend, your work is finished.......
If you want on or off the DIESEL "KnOcK" LIST just FReepmail me........
This is a fairly HIGH VOLUME ping list on some days......
HAT TIP TO NYPOKERFACE!.....
Posted on 05/21/2007 5:48:17 PM PDT by nypokerface
WASHINGTON, May 21 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Energy has issued a feasibility study for a commercial 50,000-barrel-a-day coal-to-liquids facility in the Illinois coal basin.
The department's National Energy Technology Laboratory said the conceptual design of the CTL plant provides a performance baseline to demonstrate how the technology could capitalize on domestic energy resources, while providing a bulwark against rising petroleum and natural gas prices.
The price of coal-derived liquid fuels has traditionally been unable to compete with the price of fuels derived from crude oil. But, as oil prices rise, domestic sources of transportation fuels are becoming more affordable.
The CTL plant design is projected to use 24,533 tons of high-sulfur bituminous coal daily to produce 27,819 barrels per day of diesel fuel that, with additives, could be delivered to end-use customers. Department of Energy scientists said such a plant could also theoretically produce 22,173 barrels per day of liquid naptha products that could eventually become a chemical feedstock.
I agree that hydrocarbon fuel is dirty and I am an advocate of H from H20, fuel cells and nuclear power; not to mention superconducting transmission facilities. I was trying not to go off topic.
A drop in the bucket.
The weak dollar boosted oil prices too.
I recall reading that one problem is that even if OPEC drives up the price of oil above the cost of oil shale, that wouldn't make oil shale economically viable as long as OPEC retains the ability to reduce prices.
Suppose, for example, that for one billion dollars a company could gain the ability to produce an unlimited quantity of oil for $40/barrel. It's been a long time since OPEC has sold oil that cheap, but if someone started selling oil for $40/barrel, OPEC would probably respond by selling its oil for $39/barrel. Almost everyone in the U.S. would be better off as a result of OPEC's being forced to cut its prices, except for the company that spent $1B which it may never recover.
Bump
“They proved the commercial viability of converting coal to a liquid, not unlike gasoline, and to a gas not unlike natural gas. Unfortunately the cost per gallon to produce it at that time was well above the cost of gasoline.”
Then wouldn’t it be they proved technical potential but commercial non-viability.
Hmmm... let’s think about this...
28 billion gallons - population 300 million - works out to 93-1/3 gallon per year for every man woman and child in the country.
For family of 4 - 373 gallons per year - more than 1 gallon per day... JUST in resturants.
That’s a lotta deep-fat-fryin goin on.
I doubt this is correct...
Pure fantasy. You might as well talk about cars that run on pixie dust.
OPEC is not capable of produce even half the world's demand for oil.
Thanks for posting, will read into.
You are spoiling my fun ^^, but that's OK. What you pointed out is interesting because even if it was true (which it obviously isn't) it would only supply a fraction of our energy needs.
Rest In Peace, old friend, your work is finished.......
If you want on or off the DIESEL "KnOcK" LIST just FReepmail me........
This is a fairly HIGH VOLUME ping list on some days......
HAT TIP TO NYPOKERFACE!.....
IT’S ABOUT TIME!!!!!.......
In round numbers thats about a barrel per ton of coal. As far as BTU’s is concerned there is a whole lot of wasted energy going somewhere. Do you know if the byproduct of the oil extraction be used as solid fuel anymore?
I dunno about by products, but there are companies using CTL technology TODAY! Why the DOE needs to stdy this is a mystery.......oops! Truban Durbin and Bareback Osama
are Senators from Illinois!.....mystery solved.......
From WIKI on Fischer-Tropsch CTL:
UTILIZATION
Currently, only a handful of companies have commercialised their FT technology.
1. Shell in Bintulu, Malaysia, uses natural gas as a feedstock, and produces primarily low-sulfur diesel fuels and food-grade wax.
2. Sasol in South Africa uses coal and natural gas as a feedstock, and produces a variety of synthetic petroleum products. Sasol produces most of the country’s diesel fuel.
The process was used in South Africa to meet its energy needs during its isolation under Apartheid. This process has received renewed attention in the quest to produce low sulfur diesel fuel in order to minimize the environmental impact from the use of diesel engines.
Syntroleum, a publicly traded US company (Nasdaq: SYNM) has produced over 400,000 gallons of diesel and jet fuel from the Fischer-Tropsch process at its demonstration plant near Tulsa, Oklahoma. Using natural gas as a feedstock, the ultra-clean, low sulfur fuel has been tested extensively by the US Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation, and most recently, the Department of Defense, which utilized the fuel in a flight test of a B-52 bomber at Edwards Air Force Base, CA. Syntroleum is working to commercialize its proprietary Fischer-Tropsch technology via coal-to-liquid plants in the US, China, and Germany, as well as gas-to-liquid plants internationally.
A small US-based company, Rentech, is currently focusing on converting nitrogen-fertiliser plants from using a natural gas feedstock to using coal or coke, and producing liquid hydrocarbons as a by-product.
Also Choren in Germany, CWT (Changing World Technologies) Alchem Field Services, and The GTL Corporation have built FT plants or use similar processes. Alchem and the GTL Corporation employ a micro-GTL process that is compact in that their equipment is used directly at natural gas well sites.
The FT process is an established technology and already applied on a large scale, although its popularity is hampered by high capital costs, high operation and maintenance costs, and the uncertain and volatile price of crude oil. In particular, the use of natural gas as a feedstock only becomes practical when using “stranded gas”, i.e. sources of natural gas far from major cities which are impractical to exploit with conventional gas pipelines and LNG technology; otherwise, the direct sale of natural gas to consumers would become much more profitable. There are several companies developing the process to enable practical exploitation of so-called stranded gas reserves. It is expected by geologists that supplies of natural gas will peak 5-15 years after oil does, although such predictions are difficult to make and often highly uncertain.
There are large coal reserves which may increasingly be used as a fuel source during oil depletion. Since there are large coal reserves in the world, this technology could be used as an interim transportation fuel if conventional oil were to become more expensive. Combination of biomass gasification (BG) and Fischer-Tropsch (FT) synthesis is a very promising route to produce renewable or ‘green’ transportation fuels.
In Sept. 2005, Pennsylvania governor Edward Rendell announced [2] a venture with Waste Management and Processors Inc. — using technology licensed from Shell and Sasol — to build an FT plant that will convert so-called waste coal (leftovers from the mining process) into low-sulfur diesel fuel at a site outside of Mahanoy City, northwest of Philadelphia. [3]. The state of Pennsylvania has committed to buy a significant percentage of the plant’s output and, together with the U.S. Dept. of Energy, has offered over $140 million in tax incentives. Other coal-producing states are exploring similar plans. Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana has proposed developing a plant that would use the FT process to turn his state’s coal reserves into fuel in order to help alleviate the United States’ dependence on foreign oil. [4]
In Oct. 2006, Finnish paper and pulp manufacturer UPM announced its plans to produce biodiesel by Fischer-Tropsch process alongside the manufacturing processes at its European paper and pulp plants, using waste biomass resulted by paper and pulp manufacturing processes as source material. [5]
So, we could produce fuel from an abundant domestic resource for a turbo charged compression ignition engine that today can be designed to be very clean burning, get 40+MPG, carry 4 passengers and be reliable for 500,000+ miles with minimal maintenance.
I can’t imagine who would be opposed to such an advancement as that! /s
It’s going to take some serious American entrepreneur spirit to overcome the forces opposing this type of innovation. Technologically speaking, this isn’t a gamble. It is very doable.
What do you think?
Good post!!!
From what I recall, Ashland Oil was primarily if not strictly a refiner and had little, if any oil production themselves. It certainly would have been in their best interest to make coal liquefaction work if they could and diversify away from the oil markets.
Today, by far the biggest refiner in this country is Valero and they have little if any oil. It would be in their best interest to make this technology work. Must be a good reason.
This idea makes a lot of sense as the US has nearly 300 years worth of coal and declining oil production. There technology is very well-established and has been practiced on a large-scale in South Africa for over 50 years. The only issue is the high capital cost of the plants and the time needed to build them and bring them on-stream. Because of this, it might be decades before a significant fraction of our gasoline could be produced from coal.”
I think it's called ROI.
I'm a big believer in the economics of free enterprise and a free market. An honest and informed evaluation of ROI makes for good decisions. For a good ROI, private investment dollars are always available.
But that's where government steps in. When the ROI doesn't make sense, but politicians can get votes from dishonest or ill-informed people, spending tax dollars is the solution. Our county just started a government-run bus service after touting how much money the county was going to make once it was operational. Of course it took public "investment" of tax dollars to get it operational. They're still waiting for the "return."
The proposed CTL plant is the same thing. Buy votes in Illinois by making a bad ROI decision.
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