Obama gave a powerful call to action on energy and climate, and he has given the order to halt Bush’s final rules. But if he really wants to send a quick, strong signal that he intends to preserve a livable climate, he should intervene immediately to stop the Pentagon’s toxic dalliance with liquid coal.
As reported by Air Force Times on Tuesday:
The future of a synthetic fuel plant that would power fighters and cargo planes with processed coal will be announced this week.
The Air Force decided on Friday whether to move ahead with a plan to build a synthetic fuel plant at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont.
Due to the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and the inauguration, Air Force spokesman Gary Strasburg said the decision will not be released until Wednesday.
[Note: I can't find any notice of this decision on Google News or MT newspapers.]
UPDATE: My sources say the decision “has been delayed.”
This is simply a terrible idea (see “Coal-to-Liquid Is a Dead End” and “Congress should say NO to coal-to-diesel” and links below), especially since clean alternatives are on the way “Boeing: Jet biofuel in three years“).
Obama said in his powerful inaugural address: “we will work tirelessly to … roll back the specter of a warming planet.” That can’t be done running your Air Force on liquid coal:
Obama should kill this plant if the Air Force doesn’t, and then immediately make clear that America is not going to run its military on a fuel that itself worsens the greatest national security threat.
The proposal is part of the Air Force’s Enhanced Use Lease program, which allows a private company to lease space on military bases in exchange for base infrastructure improvements.
The owners of the proposed plant at Malmstrom would pay the Air Force in fuel.
This is just a clever way to get around the impossible economics of liquid coal — although given the current low price of oil, it is inconceivable that this liquid coal plant makes any sense for the Air Force today.
If the decision on Friday turned out to be a positive one, then we know the fix will have been in by the liquid-coal military industrial complex. But then, the Air Force has been fooling itself and trying to fool the public for a long time under President Bush (see “Memo to Air Force: Stop misleading the public on liquid coal“).
The Air Force plans to certify all its airframes on domestic synthetic fuel by 2011 and has been checking off test flights steadily: The B-52, C-17, B-1 and F-15 have all flown with a 50-50 blend of conventional jet fuel and coal-derived diesel.
The service is responsible for 10 percent of aviation fuel consumption in the country and spends billions a year on jet fuel.
The Air Force’s stated goal is to fly all planes with the 50-percent blend by 2016.
Ending this self-destructive vision for the Pentagon should be one of Obama’s easier decisions.
Related Posts:
- Video: The Folly of Liquid Coal
- Liquid coal means liquid problems
- The WSJ (and Climate Progress) on Liquid Coal
- Liquid Coal Hearing Report
- The Post Gets Coal-Liquids Story Mostly Right
- Plug-in Hybrids Beat Coal-to-Liquids (Duh!)
- Coal State Newspapers Attack Liquid-Coal Plans
- Some Thoughts on Coal to Diesel
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Thanks for highlighting this.
As you say, it should be one of the easier decisions and, therefore, a pretty friendly litmus test.
How fast the leader leads on this (killing the plant, if it’s still alive, and ending the self-destructive vision as a whole) will provide useful information for other community organizers, big and small.
Far more disturbing is that our military, knowing global warming to be the greatest threat to US security, is now acting so contrary to a defense mandate.
Talk to me when you are not sacrificing food production for fuel.
Also most of the high yield ethanol plants are terribly hard on the soil without fertilizer. Within a few decades unfertilized sugar and corn rapes the land.
All these food to fuel projects are silly…except from the standpoint of preparing for mass suicide. While tremendously popular with farmers for driving the price of food crops up, there is a world food shortage. Sure each region should have only as many people as it can NATURALLY grow today without artificial agriculture. Let’s kill off 95% of humans as is the real thrust of most ecological arguments. But until that mass suicide voluntarily happens….
Also just because you shove green plants into the process doesn’t make that process “bio-friendly”. Just because it is “organic” doesn’t justify marking it down as “Free” economically or ecologically either. It has been shown time and again that the costs of growing, processing, and distributing ethanol products is not done with the same rigor as fossil fuel. And the hazards are simply discounted until “after we have change and observation”. The same rape the world attitude as fossil fuel hiding in “GREEN” industry clothes.
Organic fertilizer on mass scale? Yes it can be done. But it has not been done on more than a few score hectares at a time for good reason. First organic fertilizer (urban sewage) is very BULKY meaning tremendous costs for haulage, distribution and working it into soil. Yeah big cities are often scores of kilometers from the growing fields. Plus it takes a lot of solar powered processing time to sterilize sewage to where it is not a biohazard…though goodness knows that is an improvement or dumping in rivers and seas. Runoff of organic fertilizer can be chemically as bad as artificial fertilizer but also adds the threat of lots more “silt” to thicken and clog the water with particles.
Obama is Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. He can just issue an order to the Pentagon to cancel the program.
Coal to liquid fuel. Maybe not the world farthest looking fuel. But then it allows “recycling” the current military hardware rather than remanufacturing all those billions of dollars of toxic stealth planes.
I think the FEAR is that coal to liquid will prove economical and displace the favorite GREEN sources. Because otherwise the US military is actually a very limited energy consumer at least compared with the far more numerous civilian and industrial use.
Coal is extra dirty not for carbon but for the impurities of other chemicals. Heh heh I guarantee you that military jets won’t be burning the impurities and fouling their engines.
Will the impurities get dumped into the environment in some other form? Probably.
On the other hand, have you ever stood downwind of a burning cornfield of dried stalks? Very nasty. Someone people can have fatal asthma attacks. Yet no one jumps up and down about corn ethanol impurities into the environment. The fact of the matter is, it is all how the impurities are handled. They can be distributed as pollutants or as helpful products or anywhere in between.
Just remember COAL WAS MADE FROM GREEN PLANTS and all that coal carbon was once in the environment. So TECHNICALLY coal is a GREEN POWER source. The bad side effects just point out that humankind is using coal wrong and that ANY GREEN POWER SOURCE USED UNWISELY CAN BECOME A PROBLEM.
Plus the earth historically has always been changing even before man. This call for panic if we can’t freeze the ecosystem, maybe the silliest anti-natural move man ever made. The earth never required man to have ice ages and global warming before & a million years is a blink of an eye to the earth. So to say it hasn’t happen in the last million years — doesn’t mean the earth was about to turn into an oven all by itself. Hubris can come in many forms not just pollution. Still pollution is a thumb on the scales.
On the other hand…it might be wise to prepare as if global warming can’t be stopped. Put samples of your favorite about to be extinct fuzzy animal in the zoological genetic banks. Move the damn cities off the coasts and most fertile croplands. Prepare to greet the animals that evolve to fill the ecological niches. Yeah and pay attention to the palentologists who have been saying that mass die off have happened before if you look back far enough in earth history — and often within a few score years or less.
Call not to stop the coal plant — call to have all military equipment recycled. No equipment — no need for fuel.
Peace at any cost-even death. Save the world for super intelligent kitties and doggies.
Save the world – neuter or spay your children. Humans are evil and bad. Bury yourself after you stand over the grave of the next to last human.
Will peer pressure save the planet?
“…haven’t got round to insulating your home? Hi-tech detector vans are hitting the streets to shame you. ”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/22/energyefficiency-carbonemissions
Speaking of Peabody, ConocoPhillips and Peabody Energy have filed an air permit with the Commonwealth of Kentucky to site a coal-to-natural-gas facility, which will be called Kentucky NewGas.
@Richard Pauli: An astute observation. If you accept the premise that the USAF eschews stupidity, one would suspect that the Peabody deal was a matter of political niceties. You know, like Iraq I & II.
The Lede, a blog associated with the New York Times, seems to misunderstand the issue completely:
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/the-us-militarys-energy-saving-efforts/?hp
They are citing this as an example of the Air Force “trying to be true stewards of the environment.” There is no reason for which synthetic fuels are necessarily more environmentally friendly than petroleum; indeed, those made from coal are significantly worse.
Might be a Draw said:
“Just remember COAL WAS MADE FROM GREEN PLANTS and all that coal carbon was once in the environment. So TECHNICALLY coal is a GREEN POWER source.”
That is not true.
Coal is the result of millions if not billions of years of accumulated plant and animal material. When burned, it releases this millions of years of stored up carbon right now.
That is completely different than releasing CO2 that was absorbed by plants this year!
There is no net gain of CO2 in the atmosphere in the latter case.
You said:
“Put samples of your favorite about to be extinct fuzzy animal in the zoological genetic banks. Move the damn cities off the coasts and most fertile croplands. Prepare to greet the animals that evolve to fill the ecological niches”
This is an ignorant statement if ever there was one. Have you even heard of the concept of ecosystems? It isn’t some warm and fuzzy adoration of polar bears and other creatures, but the survival of the ecosytems which these species are part of. We are interdependent on those ecosystems. Man cannot survive in a world where the ecosystems collapse. What don’t you get about that?
The endangered species act, which anti enviromentalists hate, is a watered down compromise to please people like you, who don’t understand the concept of ecosytems.
You would have screamed bloody murder if anyone actually proposed protecting the ecosystems, like forests, as the whole systems which they are. And people like you did scream, and the ESA is the watered down result. The endangered species are indicator species for the ecosystems they are an integral part of.
Did you know that salmon are vital to a healthy forest for instance? Animals eat the salmon by the millions and spread nitrogen throughout the forest.
It isn’t a logging trees verses saving the fish situation. They are part of a whole, which is greater than the sum of it’s parts.
I added something about this to the President’s Briefing Book (just before it closed). I personally think Fischer-Tropsch is great for making jet fuel; the only problem is the source of hydrogen and carbon.
http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/12/jet-fuel.html
Get the hydrogen from electrolysis of seawater with renewable electricity, and the carbon scrubbing CO2 from the air, and it’s suddenly carbon neutral. (Inefficient, true, but then jets never were very efficient.) By my calculations, if electricity can be made for 5 cents/kWh, jet fuel can be made for $4.50/gallon or so.
The air force can run jus’ fine on biofuel made from oil seed. I suggest Jatropha.
Coal-To-Liquids.
Didn’t the TVA do that a few weeks ago?
ATTN: Might be a Draw
RE : I think the FEAR is that coal to liquid will prove economical
and displace the favorite GREEN sources.
As a matter of fact, it is. GO: http://www.SASOL.com. The process used to produce liquid hydrocarbons from coal is essentially the same that was developed in 1930′s and was used on a massive scale by Germany during WW II. The reaction is known as the Fischer-Tropsch process and the reactors are the Lurgi gassifer. Due to the embargo of importation of crude oil, South Africa was forced to produce hydrocarbons by this process. Fortunately, for South Africa, coal is readily availble from easily-minable deposits.
I said the following many time here and elsewhere and I’m going to say this one more time because you guys are not paying attention and you just don’t get it. Boats, planes, trains, freight trucks, intercity buses, heavy machinery used in agriculture, mining, construction, forestry, etc., cars and light trucks with spirit and muscle (i.e., hot V-8′s), H-D hogs, ATV’s, etc, all military machines and vehicles, and Diesel-electric generating systems, which are used thru out world, etc will require and always use hydrocarbon fuels because these fuels have HIGH ENERGY DENSITY, and are readily prepared from crude oil, which exists abundantly free in Nature and is easily recoverable, by fractional distillation, a low energy physical process that does not involve the breaking of chemical bonds. Even cat cracking of the heavy distillate fractions into the lighter fuels fractions is a low energy process.
These hydrocarbon fuels are non-toxic, chemically inert, except toward reaction with oxygen and a few other highly-reactive chemicals suchas the halogens and ozone, have low solvent power, are highly portable, and can be stored indefinetly in sealed continers and under an inert atmosphere (i.e. nitogen) in large tanks. Low solvent power is quite important because it greatly reduces the material cost of fuel despensing and delivery systems.
There are no subsitutes for these fuels and there will never will be. Finally, we will never run out oil. Peak oil only refer to convential oil recovered by primary, secondary, tertiary methods. There are an estimated 10 to 15 trillion barrels of oil equivalents of unconvential oil which are the heavy and extra heavy crude oils and the oil shale and sands. Shell Oil R and D has several pilot projects in northwest Colorado the uses in-situ resistive heating to crack the kerogen in oil shale to a crude oil that can be pumped out of the formation. When this process is brought into commercial production, crude oil will be recoverd from the shale oil like water from well. There is one little snag: a nuclear power plant will probably be required to supply the juice for this process. Go over to the oil drum and read about this proceess.
GO: http://www.heavyoil info.com to learn about the methods for recovery of heavy and extra heavy crude oils.
[JR: Many of the means of transport you cite above do not need liquid fuels, and in any case, low carbon biofuels -- including bio-gasoline, bio-jetfuel, and cellulosic diesel -- are likely to be available in coming decades, albeit not in unlimited quantities. You seem to not care about destroying a livable climate and assume humanity will not take steps to prevent that grim outcome. If so, this may not be the blog for you.]
The Idaho National Lab has demonstrated that simultaneous electrolysis of CO2 and water (which they call “syntrolysis”) can produce syngas (CO + H2), which can easily be converted to liquid fuel for jets etc. by the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.
So where will the energy for this electrolysis come from? Not coal or other fossil fuels, because they create more CO2 than they can crack. Renewables are the answer. CO2 thus becomes a medium for storing the energy that can’t go into the grid because of the reliability problem of renewables.
The synthetic gasoline the Germans used during WW2 has some disadvantages beyond the CO2, although the CO2 issue should certainly kill it.
1. LIQUID fuel made from coal contains so much powdered rock that it wears out an engine in a great hurry. To get rid of the powdered rock, you must first make the coal into a gas, wasting even more energy, then convert the gas into a liquid. The Air Force would be replacing engines so often that they would be in the air less. The Germans lost battles when their tanks used synthetic gasoline. It just isn’t a good fuel.
2. Reference Oak Ridge [Tennessee] National Laboratory report:
http://www.ornl.gov/ORNLReview/rev26-34/text/coalmain.html
Coal is carbon except for the impurities: URANIUM, ARSENIC, LEAD, MERCURY, Thorium, Antimony, Cobalt, Nickel, Copper, Selenium, Barium, Fluorine, Silver, Beryllium, Iron, Sulfur, Boron, Titanium, Cadmium, Magnesium, Calcium, Manganese, Vanadium, Chlorine, Aluminum, Chromium, Molybdenum and Zinc. Coal smoke and cinders are commercially viable ORE for the above elements. Coal cinders and ash were considered as a source of uranium during the Manhattan project. The cinders and ash from a coal fired power plant contains more energy in the form of uranium and thorium than the coal fired power plant produces.
3. Coal is a kind of rock. Reference: “Energy in America” by Ingrid Kelley, 2008, pages 21 and 23
Coal carbon percentages
hardness name % carbon
hardest anthracite 86 to 98
hard bituminous 45 to 86
soft sub-bituminous 35 to 45
softest lignite 25 to 35
The remainder in each case is rock that is not carbon and the atoms of organic molecules other than carbon atoms. Some of the organic molecules are hazardous. UP TO 75% OF A LUMP OF LIGNITE IS ROCK OTHER THAN CARBON!!!!
The military recently has also noticed increasing dangers posed by it’s reliance on fossil fuels.
This includes fighting and dying for oil supply in middle east.
It includes the fact that getting fossil fuels to forces in war zones is becoming a primary vulnerability in war time. Targeting of fuel trucks has become an easy way to hamper USA military in Iraq.
It includes having to plan for and be ready for increasing number of security threats caused by our national and military fuel sources being ever more concentrated in the hands of “unfriendlies”.
It includes the budget busting fuel bills during price spikes like we saw last year. This massive drain on military funding meant unplanned cutbacks in other areas.
It includes the increasing national security threats they are seeing emerge from unchecked climate change.
They are probably more ready to find replacements that civilians are.
RE: Harold Pierce Jr “we will never run out of oil. Peak oil only refers to conventional oil…”
That’s not my understanding of Peak Oil theory. The problem isn’t the amount of oil left in the ground or locked in unconventional sources like tar sands and oil shale. Peak Oil says there will alway be lots of oil left.
The problems are two fold:
1) first Energy Returned for Energy Invested is declining rapidly as we exhaust the easy to get oil. It is 100-to-1 for Saudi super-giant field. It is down to 5-to-1 for the best case tar sands. It is negative for some bio-fuels. Much of the oil left will prove to be too energy expensive to get out. Just look at any ROEI trend chart for oil sources to see the future clearly.
2) the maximum possible rate of extraction (potential supply) has not been able to grow as fast as demand. We don’t notice it because demand is still lower. But the curves show it won’t be long before demand hits max potential supply. Once it does the price goes up to cost-of-access and the economy is bled of capital. actually speculators were already betting this would happen last year before the petro-dollar-suck killed the economy. The high ROEI of new oil sources means higher costs, longer lead times and more energy needs to get it out. Take a look at the capital spending vs declining production for any of the energy majors in the last few years.
There are very few uses of oil that don’t already have alternatives emerging. However the transition is the ugly bit. Oil-based infrastructure tends to be expensive and long-lasting.
All the more reason to get off it while we have time and capital left to make the transition.
Hey Joe!
If you can’t stand Harold Heat, then get the hell out of kitchen!
Now get out an up-to-date atlas of the world and study it. After a few monents, you will come to these startling and remarkable conclusions: (1) there are few humans on the earth, (2) humans actually occupy about 3-4 % of the earth’s surface, (3) 50 % of the humans live in urban areas, most of which are located near coastlines and (4) humans are rapidly abanding the country side and moving to the cities in ever increasing numbers because that’s where the action is! And this is why the AGW hypothesis is false!
Due to instant world-wide communication, there is the impression that the earth is highly populated and humans are destroying it. Not so. Check out Siberia and Canada for example. There are no humans on these large land masses which are still pristine wilderness. Ditto for polar regions. And most of western Australia ans so forth.
“… do not need liquid fuels…” Your right. We can use coal for boats, trains, tractors, cars (cf, Stanley steamer) steam shovels, etc.
…low carbon biofuels…” That is absolute nonsence. These don’t exits. Bio fuel ethanol is 52 % carbon by weight. Bio-Diesel methyl oleate is 77 %, carbon by weight. Clearly, you don’t know what are talking about and are just another know-nothing nincompoop nattering neo-enviromental and neo-liberal nonsense! About what you would expect from a card-carrying member of the Eastern Liberal Establishment.
I’m coming after you Joe “Rantin’ Joe’ Romm. I’m going to put so much Harold Heat on you that you’ll turn into a charcoal briquette. Then I’m going a take a chunk of it to Gemesis in Florida where they will turn it into pumkin-colored fancy diamonds which I’ll bring back to NYC and auction off to the Tiffany crowd, the silk-stocking enviromentalists and the limosine liberals!
Can you take Harold Heat Rantin’ Joe? I’don’t think so! Go ahead and whack this post. It will shortly appear over at Anthony’s blog!
I think Harold is off his meds again.
–Martin
Harold — If you can’t stand the heat, stop trying to accelerate global warming.
Since you have broken three of the commenting rules here, you get put on moderation.
First, the string of ad hominems is unacceptable.
Second, you Ignored what I said and responded to what I didn’t say. I never mentioned ethanol. I did mention bio-gasoline, bio-jetfuel, and cellulosic diesel.
Third, as Martin noted, you went off your meds.
Joe, didn’t you ban Harold a few months ago?
Or maybe it was Tamino at Open Mind….
So much idiocy, so little time…
TomG
So far I have not been banned from any site. Over at RC, I have posted some results of my study of the Quatsino weather station records, and Gavin stole’em and wouldn’t let’em see the Light of Day. I’m a r-e-k-o-p player, and our crowd really likes handles and nickname. So I decided to give him the nickname “Gavin the Grinch”.
[JR: I'm sure. Meds, people, meds!]
Plans dropped.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/260/story/61042.html