Not so clean energy

Posted on March 24, 2008
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by Willy Ritch

I studiously avoid writing about certain so-called “clean” energy technologies that aren’t really all that clean. (Corn-based ethanol, for example.) But in the spirit of know thine enemy it’s probably a good idea to point out a bad idea when I see one. One such bad idea is efforts by the Air Force to started using massive amounts of coal-to-liquid (CTL) fuel.

The Air Force has offered up 700 acres of land near a base in Montana to anyone who would like to roll into town and build a CTL refinery. The land is the cheap part, however. A plant like the Air Force would like to see would cost something like $5 billion. The Air Force sees it as a national security issue–weaning themselves from a dependence on foreign oil:

”We’re going to be burning fossil fuels for a long time, and there’s three times as much coal in the ground as there are oil reserves,” said Air Force Assistant Secretary William Anderson. ”Guess what? We’re going to burn coal.”

CTL technology involves super heating coal in an oxygen starved environment so it doesn’t actually burn. The coal gives off a gas and then a catalyst is introduced that causes the gas turn into a form of diesel fuel. It’s not new–the Nazis developed it in WWII to fuel their tanks when they couldn’t get their hands on oil. The problem is that unless a lot of the CO2 is captured and stored during the manufacturing process CTL fuels have about twice the carbon footprint of regular old, straight-out-of-the-ground oil. Carbon capture and storage (CSS) has great promise, but even if some day it does reduce the greenhouse gas emitted by a CTL plant, we’re still talking about coal. You know, coal that has to be mined and transported at significant environmental expense…not to mention the high price that coal miners pay in health and safety.

Of course, the coal industry has a powerful lobby in Congress and they can put pressure on the Air Force to embrace CTL technology. And maybe it even makes some kind of sense from a national security perspective. But not from an environmental one.

Wind, solar, geothermal, fuel cell technology…there are a lot of legitimate sources of truly clean energy. And you can have some of that energy delivered straight to you house. Find out how.

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