Posted on 07/20/2004 9:27:15 AM PDT by Baby Bear
AMID continuing violence in the Middle East, the issue of energy security is again on the front burner. With oil prices rising to a peak of US$40 (S$68) a barrel, countries have been looking at alternative energy with a greater urgency. This heightened sense of urgency, fortunately, has come at a time when there is evidence that a new approach using existing resources and technology can provide alternative energy to many countries.
A glimmer of good news recently appeared: China signed an agreement with Sasol, a South African energy and chemicals firm, to build two coal-to-liquid fuel plants in China. These plants, costing US$3 billion each, are reported by the Financial Times to jointly produce 60 million tonnes of liquid fuel (440 million barrels) a year. Since China imported 100 million tonnes of oil last year, these plants would give China much control over its domestic energy situation, though its demand is growing fast.
The raw material and capital costs of a barrel of fuel would fall under US$10 and other costs would not bring total costs over US$15.
Coal resources of one trillion tonnes are widely distributed around the world. Many countries, including China, India, Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Poland, South Africa, the United States and Australia have extensive coal deposits that would last 100 years or more at current rates of exploitation. But coal is a highly polluting fuel when burned directly and also emits a lot of global-warming carbon dioxide.
The Sasol technology, a third-generation Fischer-Tropsch process, was developed in Germany and used in World War II, and later in South Africa. (Steam and oxygen are passed over coke at high temperatures and pressures; hydrogen and carbon monoxide are produced and then reassembled into liquid fuels.)
It has long been too expensive to compete with standard crude oil. On the plus side, sulphur and other pollutants such as ash and mercury are removed - the sulphur can be sold as a by-product - and carbon dioxide is segregated and can be injected underground. If hydrogen is needed for fuel cells, these plants can also provide it. In the near term, the petrol and diesel produced are high grade and clean, meeting even future 'clean diesel' requirements of the United States.
The real question is if these plants can be built and reliably produce fuels for less than US$20 a barrel. Sasol already produces 150,000 barrels a day from coal. (Conversion from natural gas is cheaper and Sasol is in the process of switching its feedstock to gas in South Africa.) Each of the Chinese plants would be four times as large as the existing Sasol plant, and scaling up can involve difficulties. If Sasol can make these larger plants work at the publicised costs, this technology could be used by many other nations - rich and poor - who are willing to forego periods of very cheap oil for more security. (Indeed, even oil-producing Indonesia is looking into a coal-to-liquids plant as it now imports oil.)
This technology also works in converting coal to natural gas at a cost of US$3 to US$3.50 per million BTUs (British thermal units). Since current natural-gas prices in the US are roughly double that, it would appear that coal-to-gas is also an economically viable technology.
The coal-to-liquid technology would compete with the evolving tar-sands technology being expanded in Canada. This technology involves the production, either by mining or extracting with steam, of heavy oil trapped in sand. The heavy oil is then massaged into more valuable fuels. This source already accounts for a quarter of Canada's 3.2 million barrels per day output. It requires natural gas to heat the tar and is energy intensive, but still has production costs of under US$20 a barrel.
Tar-sand reserves are estimated at over 250 billion barrels. These and similar technologies would allow much more plentiful isolated natural-gas reserves, coal and tar sand to be converted into liquid fuels. The long-predicted decline in petroleum production could be delayed for decades or more, and the geopolitics of energy would be rewritten at something close to or below current crude-oil costs.
Is there a downside to rapidly adopting these technologies? Yes, from a global welfare perspective. Now, onshore oil-production costs are usually under US$5 a barrel. If prices are higher, somebody (the country owning the oil or the company producing it) gets the difference between the price and the cost. If we switch to US$15-$20 costs from these other technologies, then there is no surplus of price over cost, or a much smaller one. To use an economic phrase, the 'rent' on oil production is destroyed in a quest for self-sufficiency.
While true, the instability in oil prices - as well as the threat of terrorist disruptions to supply - are such that many nations might be happy to use their own resources to produce this vital input. They are no worse off if oil can be produced at US$20 a barrel, unless the price temporarily plunges below that level as it did in the late 1990s. A stable price and supply prevents very expensive disruptions.
None of this answers critics who are properly concerned with global warming. Subsidies to hybrid or other highly efficient vehicles are probably needed to reduce emissions. In the longer term, fuel cells burning hydrogen and producing only water as a waste product are promising, but still far from being economically feasible.
Overall, the coal-to-liquid technology is only one element of an integrated programme that is needed to deal with fuel security, local pollution and global-warming issues. But, even alone, it could bring an element of stability to world oil prices and thus also to the global economy. In addition, if it redirects efforts from geopolitical competition and even conflict to investment and efficiency, it is a welcome development.
The writer is an associate professor of economics at Tufts University. Rights: YaleGlobal Online, www.yaleglobal.yale.edu
I prefer the Corn-to-Liquid solution.
Moonshine??
Since oil is a fungible good, if this process is as cheap as is claimed, we will benefit from it even if nobody in the US does a thing about it. Other countries that produce oil from coal will import less oil or be able to export more, lowering the price for us as their demand goes down. So, objections in the US really don't matter. The only question is cost, this process has a long and successful track record. I think it is very promising.
Good Point. Is anyone out there working on a catfish/lobsterfication process?
Fortunately, if China diminishes its oil imports, that decreases worldwide demand for oil and lowers our oil price anyway.
The plant is profitable and he is in charge of the secondary products that also result. Ammonia from the stack gas is sold to fertilizer plants and CO2 s piped to Canadian oil fields for secondary recovery of oil, (pump gas into ground pump oil out.)
Coal to oil is more expensive. Oil has been cheap. Peak Easy says we will not run out of oil but that it will get more expensive. 4X
All these alternatives are more expensive. It is too late.
I'm furiously working on a solution to convert ordinary river gravel into gold, through a process known as "alchemy".
TOPICS News/Current Events Click to Add Topic KEYWORDS CHINA ENERGY Click to Add Keyword ------------------------------------------------------------------------ China plant to convert coal to motor fuel United Press International | 6/19/2002 | Hil Anderson Posted on 6/19/02 9:42 PM Pacific by Jewels1091 LOS ANGELES, June 19 (UPI) -- China's long-standing interest in using its plentiful coal to offset limited petroleum supplies took a step forward this week with the signing of an agreement with an American company for the development of the world's first plant that will convert coal directly into gasoline and diesel fuel. Hydrocarbon Technologies, a Utah subsidiary of Headwaters Incorporated, announced that the $2 billion project with Shenhua Group, China's largest coal company, would eventually produce 50,000 barrels of clean-burning gasoline and diesel fuel per day. "We are excited about the many opportunities created by this landmark agreement with Shenhua Group because we believe direct conversion of coal to liquid fuels is one of the most significant coal innovations in the last 50 years," said Headwaters Chairman Kirk Benson. "The HTI Coal Process is being considered for multiple projects and our technology is in a good position to be selected." According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, China is both the largest producer and the largest consumer of coal in the world and has been grappling with an oversupply situation caused by world consumption "declining significantly" during the past several years. The Chinese government has addressed the oversupply issue, and the resulting softening of world prices, by closing mines and looking at power plant projects and export opportunities. "China has expressed a strong interest in coal liquefaction technology, and would like to see liquid fuels based on coal substitute for some of its petroleum demand for transportation," the EIA said in a research note. China, which is also a net oil importer, is currently the third-largest consumer of oil in the world and is expected to overtake No. 2 Japan in the coming decade with a projected demand of more than 10 million barrels of oil per day by 2020. The HTI process breaks coal down into small molecules that when enriched with hydrogen, form oil molecules that can be refined into diesel and gasoline fuel. The coal liquification project launched Wednesday will be built 80 miles south of Baotou in Inner Mongolia, close to Shenhua's reserves in the Shengdong Coalfield. The plant will require about 4,300 tons of coal per day when it begins production in 2005. Shenhua, which owns a 15-percent stake in the HTI liquification technology, plans to build two other similar plants in the area. In addition to this initial facility, Shenhua Group, a 15-percent owner of the technology, intends to construct three additional direct coal liquefaction plants in the Shengdong Coalfield of China, which spans Shaanxi Province and Inner Mongolia. HTI President Theo Lee said the project would provide a long-term revenue stream for the company, and would also pay dividends to the United States in the form of a new source of domestic oil. "Shenhua Group has exhibited foresight in utilizing China's vast coal resources to provide the country's future energy needs in an efficient and environmentally safe manner," said Lee. "In addition to providing an export opportunity for United States goods and services, the...HTI Coal Process will provide the United States with a commercially proven clean fuels technology that supports this country's drive toward energy independence."
If the Administration would just start talking up such technologies, OPEC will open the spigots just to try and defeat it.
Corn-to-fuel sounds better, but it can't solve the problem. Yield of either biodiesel or ethanol is about 8 barrels per acre of irrigated land per crop year. This same number is also in the range of every other processable crop. Brazil is the major user of ethanol fuel, using sugar cane as the source for a shrinking 20% of their surface transportation. Fuel ethanol costs twice as much as gasoline there, and provides only 2/3 of the energy per tankful. It works better as a gasoline blend, but it tends to damage gaskets and other rubber parts.
But back to the US. Replacing just 20% of our crude oil consumption with ethanol would require NEW, IRRIGATED land equal to the total area of Texas plus Tennessee. No, you cannot have my front yard.
It's the impurities in the coal that cause the polution, not the coal itself. Coal can be cleaned up, but the more effort that is invested in cleaning it, the higher its cost and the less attractive it is as an energy source.
ANY carbon-based fuel produces carbon dioxide, even his own body.
This guy writes like a naive little 12 year-old. He uses all the PC cliches but has little or no knowlege of thermal processes.
I seem to remember that this was in my HS chem class 30 years ago. A local power plant used to use that technology years earlier.
Simplistic explanation of CO2 production variations between coal and other hydrocarbons -
All hydrocarbon combustion processes react both carbon and hydrogen with O2 to generate energy.
The Carbon reaction creates CO2, the Hydrogen H2O (ideally).
But these fuels vary in their proportions of C and H
Coal - lots of C, little H, so plenty of CO2 per unit energy.
Natural Gas - little C, lots of H, so less CO2 per unit energy.
Liquid hydrocarbon fuels are in between.
My county of birth in NORTH CAROLINA did not raise corn but rather manufactured it
> "My county of birth in NORTH CAROLINA did not raise corn but rather manufactured it." <
Yes they did. They raised it to its highest and best use....
The largest hydrogen sink on the planet is its water, which is about 11% hydrogen. But breaking it out takes much more energy than its energy content as fuel. Gasoline, on the other hand, is more than 15% hydrogen, one of the most hydrogen dense compounds in existence. Even if we do change to a hydrogen economy, I suspect that the fuel vector will be gasoline. We certainly have the technology to use superclean gasoline as a fuel cell fuel. And when we run out, we will make more, as this article suggests.
I think the evolutionary path is through hybrid vehicles with on-board electricity generation, eventually combined with an ability to use externally supplied electricity, perhaps in towns or on major intercity routes. Using externally supplied electricity versus manufacturing fuel is far more efficient.
No, I don't know how to get all of this done, but perhaps some of you younger engineers can figure it out.
Just put windmills in front of all the seats in the Senate.
That will fuel the entire eastern seaboard.
Anything into OilGory refuse, from a Butterball Turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri, will no longer go to waste. Each day 200 tons of turkey offal will be carted to the first industrial-scale thermal depolymerization plant, recently completed in an adjacent lot, and be transformed into various useful products, including 600 barrels of light oil.
by Brad Lemley
There's work going on at the University of New Hampshire about processing algae to produce biodiesel, but there's also about 11 billion liters of waste vegetable oil in the US every year which can be converted to biodiesel through transesterification or simply heated, filtered, and used in a diesel engine.
There's also ways to produce ethanol from agricultural waste products.
Thankfully we live in America where people are used to thinking outside the box.
Jack Rich in Schuykill Co., PA has been trying to make coal into gas for number of years. Regulations, greenies and business problems have held him up.
I have heard that there are those who carry on that honorable tradition ;-)
11 billion liters/159 liters/barrel = 70 million barrels.
We use over 600 million gallons of diesel per year, so this would suffice, by itself, for less than a month. But diesel now powers only commercial transportation - planes, trucks, and trains - and virtually none of our private vehicles. If we replace gasoline powered private vehicles with diesel hybrids, even with higher efficiency, we would need three to five times as much, so that would be more like a week than a month. To supply ourselves, we would have to dedicate crops to the purpose - we simply do not produce enough out of our existing agricultural infrastructure.
Now I happen to agree with you about diesel, especially for indirect-drive (full-electric) hybrids. Diesel engines are much more fuel efficient, and could drive a rotary generator with significantly less fuel than a similar gasoline engine, although they might be harder to start/stop. It is my understanding that diesels operate efficiently over a narrower RPM range, but that is exactly how an electric generator ought to work best. But I am not aware of any manufacturer building such a powerplant, although it would seem an obvious thing to try.
Even offsetting a twelfth of our annual diesel fuel consumption would be a major accomplishment towards reducing our dependence on foreign oil.
But perhaps this sort of thing will proceed grassroots, as it has been - the last time my brother bought diesel fuel was 2 gallons on the way home to Berkeley from a trip to Los Angeles, after burning 40-odd gallons of used fryer oil that he took off the hands of a San Francisco restaurant during the trip.
That comes under the heading of "every little bit helps," but it is not transformative. Private consumption of diesel is negligible in terms of total consumption. Also, diesel alternatives cannot be used everywhere, and for some uses require considerable reprocessing.
We already run a VERY significant part of our commercial transportation on hybrid technology - every locomotive is primarily a set of electric motors to drive the wheels. Most of them also contain a large, diesel-electric generator to drive those motors, but in many places they run off of external power, supplied by a third rail or a trolley.
By the way, this is why I have to laugh when I hear about the difficulty of scaling up the small hybrid cars that are available today.
But suppose most of our cars were like this - electric powered, but with on-board generation capability to free us from the tether of external power. And now suppose that for intercity trips, or even for in-town driving by some means, you could tap into an electric grid for motive power. This would actually require little more power than our current grid can provide, and would provide a great deal of relief from dependence on oil. This would be truly transformative, and send the oil sheiks back into their tents in the desert, where they could use their oil to keep warm because we don't need to buy it from them any more.
Today, nearly 3/4 of all crude oil becomes transportation fuel, and over 95% of transportation fuel comes from oil. The lead article addresses some ways to change these numbers, but it will not happen overnight.
Far too logical for the doctrinaire ideologues on this forum. Anything that smells like applied technological solutions will send them into a frenzy of gnashing and wailing that only oil, liberated by military action, can ever be used as an energy source.
Odd attitudes for people who characterize themselves as being more insightful than knee jerk liberals.
The problem with the usual implementation of that approach is that it involves a massive, centralized electricity generating facility that disburses electricity through a grid to the end user.
Which is to say that this implementation, like all implementations of "mass transportation," is extraordinarily vulnerable to terrorism.
One of the ironies of 9-11 is that the United States is, maybe after Australia, the industrialized nation LEAST susceptible to terrorism, because our population is so widely disbursed [in the suburbs] and shuns mass transportation in favor of the family automobile.
Nations like England, France, Germany, Japan, and Taiwan [or, worse yet, Hong Kong] are just sitting ducks for terrorist attacks, because their populations are so highly concentrated, so highly dependent on mass transportation [compare Spain on 3-11], and because their power grids also tend to be highly centralized [think of the nuclear power grid in France]. Of course, the poster-child for a highly concentrated population that's highly dependent on mass transportation would be none other than Israel herself.
You could do electricity as a source of propulsion, but to shield it adequately from terrorist attack, you're gonna need a generator in every backyard across the United States, and judging from how loud those things can get, that could cause some serious insomnia.
Regulator: Far too logical for the doctrinaire ideologues on this forum. Anything that smells like applied technological solutions will send them into a frenzy of gnashing and wailing that only oil, liberated by military action, can ever be used as an energy source. Odd attitudes for people who characterize themselves as being more insightful than knee jerk liberals.
Ugh - this is even worse than what I replied to in #35 above.
Do you have any links for companies that you can recommend?
For a while I've been semi-seriously nursing this fantasy of going 100% offline - phone service from a cell phone company, internet connectivity off a satellite [e.g. DirecPC], and power from my own diesel generator [which would also power the well, for potable water].
The sorts of consumer-grade generators that they sell at e.g. Home Depot are almost as loud as going to a tractor pull, or a monster truck race.
Onan's a big name, their transfer boxes are pretty much the only ones used by the military at fixed sites. The military generators are built by different companies to specifications. At my next drill I'll try and get some more info.
I disagree. On-board generation using liquid hydrocarbon fuel provides an immediately available backup for the transportation electric grid in this plan. Yes, I understand that as soon as it went in there would be a clamor to make grid use mandatory inside cities, but an exception for grid outage ought to be part of the plan.
Good argument, though.
Thanks. I'd take any info you can get. I glanced at the Onan website, and it looks very interesting.
PS: Do you know if these generators can accomodate external fuel tanks? To be a true survivalist/anti-establishmentarian, it seems like you'd need something on the order of a 500 or 1000 gallon external diesel tank. Plus, it would be nice, for fire and/or explosive reasons, to separate the tank off into its own explosive chamber [with, say, a wall that was heavily fortified in the direction of your living structure, but lightly fortified in the direction away from your living structure, so that any potential explosion would be directed away from you]. Furthermore, with an external fuel tank, if you did get a fire, it could [at least hopefully] be contained within the generator itself, and wouldn't [necessarily] cause the tank to also go ka-boom.
Our generators have external fuel supply connectors. We use either 55 gallon drums, fuel bladders, or 600 gallon trailers. It's just a simple hose connection so you can use pretty much any type of supply tank. It's best to have gravity helping you out because the transfer pump is pretty small.
I'll try do remember to look up this post when I get back around the 20th of August. If I forget you can Freepmail me.
I don't understand why new-generation diesels, which are very common in Europe, have not been imported here. Take the Audi A2- 78.6 MPG!
http://www.audiworld.com/model/a2.html
As I understand it, diesels have a much narrower power range than gasoline engines - that is, they do not operate as efficiently outside of a narrow RPM range centered around their optimum RPM, where gasoline engines idle more easily AND operate better at high and low RPMs, probably because the ignition timing can be optimized by adjusting the spark, not possible with a diesel.
Tension rises as China scours the globe for energy
The Telegraph ^ | 19/11/2004 | Richard Spencer
Posted on 11/19/2004 7:34:07 PM PST by demlosers
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1284404/posts
Anything into Oil(solution to dependence on foregn oil?)
DISCOVER Vol. 24 No. 5 | May 2003 | Brad Lemley
Posted on 04/21/2003 5:57:41 AM PDT by honway
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/897232/posts
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