Coal
in Your Car’s Tank
The New American ^ | June 9, 2008 | Ed Hiserodt
Posted on Tuesday,
June 03, 2008 2:11:10 PM by K-oneTexas
Coal in Your Car’s Tank by Ed Hiserodt
In 1943, when Germany had virtually no sources of petroleum to fuel its Luftwaffe,
U-boats, and Tiger tanks, its scientists (arguably among the best in the world
at that time) didn’t turn to solar and wind power. Evil does not equate to
naïveté. Hitler’s technical advisers turned to another energy source to keep
their Wehrmacht running steadily for several years
without petroleum. They used the Fischer-Tropsch
process to convert coal into diesel fuel and employed the Bergius hydrogenation
(or liquefaction) process to convert coal into aviation gasoline and
high-quality truck and automobile gasoline. Coal-to-liquid Technologies
Gasoline and diesel fuel are hydrocarbons. The
name gives us a clue as to how to convert coal to liquid fuel: combine hydrogen
and carbon. Hydrocarbon fuels are designated by the number of carbon atoms in
their molecules. For example, methane, the main constituent in natural gas, has
one carbon and four hydrogen atoms. Ethane, butane, and propane are gaseous at
room temperature and have two, three, and four carbon atoms respectively.
There are many hydrocarbons, and each has its own
unique properties. Pentane, hexane, and heptane are
liquid hydrocarbons but not desirable as fuels for internal-combustion engines
as they have low ignition temperatures and cause “knocking” or premature
combustion that can seriously damage an engine. Octane, with 8 carbon and 18
hydrogen atoms, is the optimum for standard engines, while cetane
with 16 carbon and 34 hydrogen atoms is most desirable as a diesel engine fuel.
Nothing about the chemistry of coal has changed
since WWII, and it is still possible to synthesize fuel from coal, which ranges
from about 65 percent to 95 percent pure carbon. All that’s required is
hydrogen, heat, and pressure. Worldwide, such production is done only in
limited amounts although one country is a significant producer:
The question arises: “Why, if the process is
relatively simple, isn’t more coal converted into oil?” For years, the answer
to that question was cost. It was simply too expensive compared to pumping oil
out of the ground, reported to cost the Saudis less than $1 per barrel. Robert
Wright of the Department of Energy said in 2007 that coal-to-liquid technology
would only be economical once oil prices were at $40 to $50 a barrel. Now that
prices are well above that mark and will likely remain there, the problem has
become the environmentalists who fear pollution above economic hardships
brought on by high-priced motor fuels. But what if we can all have our cake and
eat it too? Taking Pollution Out of Coal
The Fischer-Tropsch
coal-to-liquid (CTL) process has three reactions to yield hydrocarbon fuels.
These reactions require a great deal of heat, heat derived from coal
combustion. This process is referred to as Indirect Liquefaction. A major
disadvantage of the technique is that the amount of coal used for heat in the
coal-to-liquid process is greater than the amount converted to fuel. As a
result, this process produces large amounts of ash, fly ash, sulfur dioxide,
and nitrogen oxides, not to mention a waste of coal.
The Direct Liquefaction process developed by Nobel
Laureate Friedrich Bergius in 1921 requires only one step where hydrogen is
combined directly with pulverized coal under high pressure and temperature to
produce various hydrocarbons depending on process variables. Since there are no
naturally occurring sources of hydrogen like “hydrogen wells,” the H2 in
existing coal-to-liquid plants (and in WWII Germany) is produced by the same
chemical reactions used in the initial step of the Fischer-Tropsch
process, i.e., it is obtained from heating coal with high-pressure steam
producing hydrogen and carbon monoxide (C + H2O —> H2 + CO).
The bulk of pollutants created from direct
liquefaction, the Bergius process, are created in the making of hydrogen for
the process, but the creation of these pollutants can be largely avoided by
separating the hydrogen with heat from a new generation of super-safe nuclear
reactors.
While anti-nuclear activists have stymied the
construction of any new power reactors in the
In traditional nuclear power plants (which are
already extremely safe), water is used as a “moderator” to slow down neutrons
so the nuclear reaction can occur, and also as a coolant and heat-transfer
medium. In a Pebble Bed Modular Reactor, cooling is accomplished by piping
helium through the pebble bed, with the spaces between fuel spheres serving as
“pipes.” The pyrolytic graphite coating of the fuel
kernels serves as the moderator. Since the helium is not made radioactive by
the neutron flux in the reactor, it can be sent directly though a turbine
generator to produce electricity or, in this case, used to provide ample heat
for the Bergius process. Posma Puts the Pieces
Together
Bonne Posma, a
successful Canadian businessman who owned a mining technology company and a
company specializing in electronics for mining and who previously worked for
the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, expanded his
company to the
Posma and his Liquid Coal Inc. (www.liquidcoal.com) appear to
have a common-sense plan to unleash American engineering and capital and to
cause a sea change in our current dependence on unfriendly foreign energy
suppliers: that plan consists of using third-generation nuclear power to provide
the heat to create oil from coal. Remarkably, this is a technology that even
most of those fearful of human-caused global warming could support, having a
smaller “carbon footprint” than even electric cars. This holds true because the
overall efficiency of a coal-fired power plant (where most electric energy is
derived for electric cars) is limited by thermodynamic laws to about 35
percent, while use of a reactor for heat to run the Bergius coal-to-liquid
process is nearly 100-percent efficient. Hence, in the CTL process, the carbon
from coal is used only for producing fuel that is converted to propulsive
energy. Conversely, only one-third of the “carbon footprint” of an electric car
powered by the output of a coal-fired plant is for propulsion, with the
remainder lost as waste heat.
The process works like this. One hundred and fifty
100-ton rail cars bring the coal feedstock for the conversion process each day.
This is about 50 percent more coal per day than used in a typical 1,000 MW
power generating plant. The feedstock is fed into the coal-to-liquid processor
where the crushed coal is liquefied by heat derived from a Pebble Bed Modular
Reactor.* Additional reactor heat is used to generate hydrogen from water. The
hydrogen and coal react to produce a variety of hydrocarbon fuels based on the
process temperatures and pressures, with diesel fuel being the most desirable
according to Posma.
Diesel fuel, which has the highest specific energy
of the hydrocarbon fuels, provides “gas mileage” twice that of ethanol and 40
percent higher than gasoline. And this isn’t the “dirty diesel” of years gone
by. For those of you accustomed to the smell of exhaust from diesel fuel
containing 500 parts per million (ppm) of sulfur,
times are a’changing. Low-sulfur fuel now on the
market has only 15 ppm. Diesel derived from the CTL
process has 5 ppm and is virtually odorless.
Liquid Coal’s projections indicate that it would
require 200 CTL plants to produce 10 million barrels of oil per day, reducing
our dependence on current imports of 12 million barrels per day by 83 percent.
While this may seem like a huge number of CTL plants, energy industry sources
report between 132 and 137 major coal-fired power plants currently under
construction. Why Not?
Of course there are obstacles standing in the way
of the building of such plants to wrest transportation fuels from coal using
methods that are both economical and have little impact on the environment —
even satisfying most of the global-warming crowd. Tax disincentives and costly
regulatory penalties for projects are high on the list of hurdles to overcome.
An example of the above is the current cost of
licensing each reactor, regardless of whether it is an exact clone of an
earlier design: $60 million to $100 million, even though, according to Posma, the Nuclear Regulatory Committee’s attitude toward
new applications has become more reasonable. Besides the regulatory cost
disincentives, which in reality would end up getting passed on to consumers
through higher energy costs, the big collar and chain holding back nuclear
power’s freedom are litigation and the bureaucratic licensing process. Posma elaborates:
To streamline the approval process, the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission (NRC) has recently introduced the
While ever ready to put up roadblocks to proven
sources of reliable energy, environmentalist influences in our government are
quick to use tax dollars to subsidize expensive, unreliable wind and solar
projects. The subsidy for wind generation is 1.9 cents per kWh alone — more
than the cost of nuclear power production, including operations, fuel, depreciation,
decommissioning, and spent-fuel storage. Solar-generation subsidies appear
purposely unfathomable, but likely off the chart. Both these technologies,
being intermittent power sources because of changes in wind speeds and things
like cloudiness, night, and precipitation, need to be backed up by conventional
power plants that must be kept constantly running (spinning reserves) so as to
be able to produce power when needed.†
There are other significant hurdles to overcome
before beginning the building of these plants, obstacles that fall under the
category of general “environmental concerns,” such as the dangers from nuclear
power-plant wastes. Besides the fact that the dangers from plant wastes are
greatly exaggerated (see “Nuclear Waste: Not a Problem” in our February 18
issue), such concerns should be weighed against other, larger environmental
concerns. For instance, what could be a bigger “environmental concern” than for
the
* Alternate technologies such as the General
Atomics GT-MHR reactors are also able to supply process heat in the 700- to
1,000°-C range, far above the 300° C temperatures current pressurized- or boiling-water
power reactors can provide. High process heat temperatures are critical to the
production of hydrogen for CTL technology. Heat from the process can be
“scavenged” to produce steam for electrical generation.
† On February 29, 2008, the West Texas grid that
has the largest percentage of wind turbine power in the
The “
With 27 percent of global reserves, the
Commercial coal mines operate in 26 states, with
1,331 mines east of the