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78 comments on Clean fuel from dirty coal?

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SocraticGadfly on February 27, 2006 - 2:20am

Schweitzer gets some dirty words from inside the state

Actually, not quite a direct reply, but Dave's post was so long (you should have resisted, respectfully speaking), that I didn't want to get buried 150 lines below.

I seriously suggest the governor, and anyone not skeptical of his claims, go to the home page of the Northern Plains Resource Council, out of Billings, at www.northernplains.org, and download their PDF "Old, dirty and insecure" near the bottom of the homepage.

Some talking points from it:

The only commercial-scale coal-to-liquids plants in the world are operated by Sasol, a South African corporation with its roots in the apartheid era. Sasol's coal-to-liquids plants emit huge quantities of a long list of airborne, liquid, and solid wastes. Sasol is converting its operations to produce liquid fuels from natural gas rather than coal to reduce environmental impacts.
Sasol officials outlined the environmental benefits of switching from coal to natural gas at Sasolburg:

Elimination of hydrogen sulfide emissions.

Sulfur dioxide emissions lowered by 15,000 tons per year.

Nitrogen oxide emissions lowered by 10,000 tons per year.

Carbon dioxide emissions lowered by 47%, or five million tons per year.

Particulates lowered by 25%.

Fine ash reduced 73%.

Solid waste reduction of 50%.

Water consumption reduced 27% - 30%.

After that comes an excellent reference chart noting just how much water would be needed for a one million barrel/day of oil offset industry and 20.000 and 80,000 barrel/day individual plants. (which is of modest size).

One million bpd of Fischer-Tropsch industry would require half again as much water as the entire Tongue River annual flow.

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Dave Cohen on February 27, 2006 - 2:54am

You're right, I should have resisted the Monty Python. Attempt at Absurdist humor.

I agree with your comments.

Re: "excellent reference chart noting just how much water would be needed for a one million barrel/day of oil offset industry and 20.000 and 80,000 barrel/day individual plants."

Excellent point. The same water problems apply to coal bed methane and so-called "tight gas" recovery here in the Rocky Mountain regions out west where I live. Water supplies here depend on winter snowfall and depleting deep water aquifers is not a good idea. Since climate change is bound to dry out these regions (there will be no operating ski areas in 20 years), then it seems crazy to think that large-scale oil & natural gas operations requiring large amounts of water could ever work here in the time-frame we care about (next 5 to 15 years).

best, Dave

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TJ on February 27, 2006 - 10:23am

I wish you anti-coal types well in your universe where there is a replacement for coal. Not that I'm particularly fond of CO2 emissions, but when natural gas shortages start appearing coal will be gasified whether you like it or not. As HO has pointed out the tech is a century old and it will be reactivated. What he didn't point out is that producer gas generators, water gas generators, and coking ovens are dirt cheap to build, quicker to build, and are about an order of magnitude more damaging to the environment than the Montana proposal. More than that, you will not be able to retrofit them for sequestration. You want to sequester a modern gasifier plant you need a compressor and a hole in the ground.

If you don't do it the right way then others will do it the cheap way. The smog and the smells will return.

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bjj on February 27, 2006 - 3:36pm

..when natural gas shortages start appearing coal will be gasified whether you like it or not.

Sadly, that's what's showing in my crystal ball. And I don't like it. Not one bit.

The cynic in me sees us burning through every possible energy source at the max sustained rate, consequences be damned.

But the hopeful dreamer part wants to help avoid that future. Y'all keep up the excellent posting around coal, GW, production data, etc. As I try to influence those around me, TOD is a significant source of hard, cold data.

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LevinK on February 27, 2006 - 3:49pm

The good news is that coal mining seems to be already pretty much strained (I have that as a general impression from HO posts). Probably we are far from peak coal yet, but significantly ramping it up could be very difficult.

So.. look again in that crystal ball; I think you will see this:

not this:

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TJ on February 27, 2006 - 4:14pm

Maybe. But if the coal deposits exist then it becomes a question of what's cheaper and quicker to expand: coal strip mining with coal gasifiers, FT units, and steam power plants; or reactor building and mass conversion of oil and natural gas usage to electricity. Since your base investment for the second alternative is essentially zero right now my guess would be the first would be way cheaper and quicker. This would especially be true if a crisis hits and pollution concerns go out the window.

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tom deplume on February 28, 2006 - 1:07pm

Last month I was driving down west coast of Michigan on a bright sunny morning. It was a very rare cloudless day with one exception, the plume of vapor from the Palisades Nuclear Powerplant near South Haven. It stood out clearly for 50 miles as the only blemish on a extremely blue sky. It is truly amazing how much energy those cooling towers throw away while its neighbors are burning nat gas and propane on a cold January morning.

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Paula on February 28, 2006 - 1:13pm

It's worth bearing in mind that water vapor is a much more potent greenhouse gas than C02.

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LevinK on February 28, 2006 - 4:39pm

AFAIK water vapor is in a thermodynamical balance in the atmosphere and there is not a lot that we humans can do to affect it.

Oceans are producing million times as much vapor as all human activities combined. It would be interesting though to see how GW plays on this - we can expect with rising temperatures the air humidity to grow producing a positive feedback. On the other hand the water cycle (evaporation -> precipitation) will intensify, taking away some of the energy absorbed by the oceans thus cooling them off. I have to check but probably the total efect would be neutral because it is absent in the climatographic models I've seen.

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SocraticGadfly on March 1, 2006 - 1:31am

Ahh, but a warmer atmosphere cdan hold more H2O vapor.

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LevinK on February 28, 2006 - 4:41pm

Unfortunately our urban development pattern was not designed for the central heating that could utilise this energy.

Maybe Kunstler would turn out being right that it is mostly Suburbia to blame for our worries.

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jim burke on April 17, 2006 - 4:32pm

I live in the arid west, and the fight over water supplies is fierce. It's hard to imagine very much local water can be diverted to FT and other methods of coal conversion.

Two possibilities: build a water pipeline from the East/North to the west; or ship the coal to where it will be used, and FT it there.

Any comments? Is this feasible?

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LevinK on February 27, 2006 - 11:02am

Probably technically incorrect suggestion, but could not they pump water from the sea?

Considering how much fresh water would be wasted maybe it would be economically and enviromentally better decision to build a pipeline to deliver it... just a wild idea :)

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TJ on February 27, 2006 - 11:11am

The water is used in a boiler to make steam, so it would be possible to use sea water, and if they went big time they probably would put in a pipeline. Also, apparently they are going to use lignite coal, which has a water content of 30-40%, which cuts down the external water requirement by quite a bit.

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JayD on February 27, 2006 - 11:37pm

Water is used for the process, and while lignite has high moisture content it doesn't have enough to provide all of the water needed to produce the fuel.

The down side of the high moisture content is you have to heat up all that water along with the coal to very high temperatures, which is inefficient and costly. You also need a lot more water for cooling.

We are a very long way from the ocean here in Montana. It's hard to judge since there are no plants in the world like what is being proposed, but it's safe to say this is an economically marginal prospect, even at a lot higher than $35 or $40 a barrel or whatever the going rate on guesses about breakeven price is nowadays.

We have no where near the extra capacity in our existing mines you'd need to supply the first plant, and we'd need tons of infrastructure (railroads, roads, hospitals, jails, towns, apartments, trailer courts, municipal water systems, drug treatment centers) for it/them, too.

Then you've gotta have a pipeline and compressors to send the CO2 wherever it is you're going to sequester it.

Can't tell you if you'd have to have a desalinization plant. With or without that, I think I'd rather buy people hybrid cars with the several hundred billion you'd need to build enough plants to replace a significant percentage of foreign oil.

If there's some left over we could spread some cellulosic ethanol plants and a couple of biodiesel plants around Eastern Montana (1/10th the investment cost per daily barrel of capacity) in amongst the windmills. That's more appropriate to the scale of economic development we need.

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TJ on February 28, 2006 - 8:52am

The $40/bbl is certainly too low. However, I see no signs that oil will ever go that low again. And as far as all the new infrastructure required, I suspect the governor sees that as a bonus. It's a hell of a lot of jobs in state, that don't show up if you import a bunch of Priuses.

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JayD on March 2, 2006 - 2:19am

I'm sure you are right, that is what he is thinking. It might be wise for Governor Schweitzer to talk to former Colorado Governor Lamm, or anyone who remembers Black Friday in Parachute, Colorado.

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Heading Out on February 27, 2006 - 1:49pm

The CBS piece did have an opponent to the idea on the show, and though the picture is small I suspect that it was Helen Waller of the NPRC.

Western coal in general is lower sulfur than some of the Midwestern and Eastern coals, though I have not checked the numbers (they are in the EIA data files).

We have devoted some column feet to discussing how the natural gas supply in the United States is depleting. Thus the option of a Gas-to-liquid conversion may not be realistic. Further, some of the countries abroad that have been considering this have decided not to.

Bear in mind that the oil shortage will not be solved by a single silver bullet, but rather by a whole variety of bb's - of which this could well be one - all contributing their portion.

The opponent was pushing biofuel, and if I remember, the Governor pointed out that this would produce much less oil than his choice.

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JayD on February 27, 2006 - 11:53pm

You are correct that the counterpoint on 60 minutes was Helen Waller, of the Northern Plains Resource Council. On that site you can find criticisms that did not make it onto 60 minutes.

It is correct that the oil shortage will not be solved by a single silver bullet. Beyond efficiency (mileage investments e.g. hybrids), the question becomes what is the best investment that will be fastest, cleanest, cheapest. Montanans are also interested in something that maximizes economic benefits to local people.

Using these criteria biofuels are a better fit than F-T diesel. The Governor said that if the U.S. diverted our food crop exports, it would only replace 15% of our liquid fuel needs. However, biofuels can be produced from non-feed crops, and from perennials (e.g. switchgrass) that can be grown on acres not suitable for row crops like corn, soybeans and wheat.

The unstated assumption was that there are not more severe obstacles to producing 5% or 15% of our liquid fuel needs from coal. As you can see here, the obstacles are environmental, economic, and physical.

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