Much Ado about Coal Gasification

David Roberts over at Grist provides a summary of recent articles on coal gasification, an alt fuel idea of rejuvenated popularity due to high oil prices. The latest hubub has centered around Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer's nationally-scaled promotion (with posts on Daily Kos) of allegedly clean diesel for automobiles derived from coal through the Fischer-Tropsch process. The process is only clean if the carbon dioxide emitted from the process (which amounts to about twice as much as when petroleum is burned), is sequestered, i.e. not released into the air.

Schweitzer's zeal in pushing coal gasification -- motivated greatly by Montana's huge coal resources -- has yielded some pretty compelling pros to gasifying coal at a time when we need to free ourselves from our dependence on oil and when cleaner coal-to-gas plants would be a better alternative than the upcoming wave of conventional coal power plants proposed to be built in the U.S. in the near future, but Roberts is still rightly skeptical.

Having read a good bit about all this, my skepticism has not been overcome. Here are what I see as the big limitations on gasification/sequestration:

- Coal boosters say we have 250 years worth of coal in this country. But as Jeff Goodell argues persuasively in Big Coal, this number is wildly exaggerated. Much of that coal lies under inhabited or wilderness areas; the estimate is based on outdated studies; it assumes our usage won't increase, but the whole point of "energy independence" would be to increase it substantially. In short, if we replace all oil with liquefied coal, we'd burn through the coal quickly and do immeasurable damage to our natural landscapes in the process.

- Schweitzer brushes off concern about mining, saying the surface mining in Montana is safe and landscapes are reclaimed. The truth is a bit more complicated.

- Right now, the only demand for CO2 sequestration comes from enhanced oil recovery. Do we really want to enable the recovery of tons more oil, which would bring the price of oil down and, oh yeah, get burned and release CO2?

- Who's going to pay for all the sequestration that doesn't help recover oil? Remember, if coal-to-liquid is to replace any substantial percentage of our oil, there's going to have to be a lot of it, and that means a lot of sequestration. Sequestration requires a great deal of money and a particular set of geological features. How will it scale up?

The more fundamental problem with the push to gasify coal is that it shows how unwilling we are as a nation to find alternative means of transportation than personal, motorized automobiles. Our stubbornness in trying to maintain our unsustainable lifestyles is directly proportional with how chimerical our energy solutions are.