Liquid Coal Why Not!!!

Here's a link to a CNN article. If it's true we definately should look in that direction.

mikell

www.msnbc.msn.com...

why put cnn when its msnbc? i shant read

Originally posted by mikellmikell
Here's a link to a CNN article. If it's true we definately should look in that direction.

mikell

www.msnbc.msn.com...

Great article mikellmikell!

This quote in the article tells it all:

With the world's largest coal reserves, the United States has enough coal to power the country for another century at least.

Oh how nice it would be to remove that oil umbilical cord. It very much reminds me of the coal-gassification trend going on now.

The Nazis knew about this and used it. The process was so expensive in fact, it started WWII and drove Hitler to attack France, Britain and Russia in search of the oilfields of Baku and the Middle East. Does not work.

The only economical way to make oil from coal is to heat the coal with NUCLEAR ENERGY.

Nuclear Oil and CTL (Coal to Liquid) Technology

Whenever we examine a potential fuel source, we must note the entire process by which that source is mined, modified, and consumed; as well as the side effects of each stage. Including what else must be mined to produce the fuel.

My point is Liquid Coal = Nuclear Waste.

Which, ultimately will be dealt with at a later date by future generations.

Perhaps that is "why not".

If the fuel source is something other than wind, water, sun, wood, beeswax, vegetable oil; or manual labor, then I object. I wish the rest of the world would follow.

Humanity needs to step out of the paradigm of finding a new fuel source because the "oil is running out"...

...and step into the paradigm of finding a new fuel source that has no net surface carbon gain, radiation gain, large scale geological impact, etc.; because it is the right thing to do.

I am,

Sri Oracle

Here is another use for coal.

Coal

It can be turned into a gas. Here is another article for the use of garbage.

Garbage

I don't think that any ONE thing will solve our energy problems, but a lot of little ones.

Originally posted by Soitenly
The Nazis knew about this and used it. The process was so expensive in fact, it started WWII and drove Hitler to attack France, Britain and Russia in search of the oilfields of Baku and the Middle East. Does not work.

Did you even read the article?
Here:
"Liquefied coal is nothing new. First developed by German scientists in the 1920s, it helped power the Nazi war machine. But until recently, turning coal to liquid (a method known as CTL) was prohibitively expensive. For two decades, until 2003, oil prices averaged $25 a barrel, making $45-a-barrel liquid coal out of the question economically. But now, with oil prices staying consistently above the $60-a-barrel mark and the environment high on everyone's agenda, liquid coal is rebranding itself as the right choice to ensure national energy security, combat high oil prices and help stop global warming."

Why would you take the article for its word? The price of oil from coal is based on the value of oil per barrel, and since oil has gone up, don't you think the price of a supposed nonexistant barell of coal oil has gone up?

Coal liquefaction is indeed feasible - if the oil stays over 35$. Also you don't need nuclear energy to make oil from coal - the process is not that energy intensive. There are 2 problems with the technology:

1. It is quite dirty - it produces a lot of CO2 plus many impurities from coal.
2. Oil companies and oil producing countries may temporarily lower the price of oil under 35$ in order to financialy ruin oil-from-coal companies and then simply rise the price again (that's the common problem with all oil alternatives). No investor will seriously consider investment into alternative oil if the competition can so easily bankrupt him. This already happened in early 80ties with oil shales - some people lost a lot of money when the oil prices went down.

Are you willing to sacrifice a mountain range in order to maintain your internal combustion habits?

www.ilovemountains.org

Originally posted by Soitenly
The Nazis knew about this and used it. The process was so expensive in fact, it started WWII and drove Hitler to attack France, Britain and Russia in search of the oilfields of Baku and the Middle East. Does not work.

Technology and understanding have progressed since then. Could be the process is very doable now.

Just like 90 and 45 nanometer fabs were impossible at the time and are now the standards for consumer electronics.

Originally posted by 0ivae
Are you willing to sacrifice a mountain range in order to maintain your internal combustion habits?

mountaintop removal

Since no one ventured to answer my rhetoriocal question, let me...

Of course not. I'd rather see Jehovah lodge his thunderbolts of wrath against the earth-choking parasite called humanity than to see this continue.

Ah but there's always a glimmer of hope in the Lord's eye that His mis-begotten race will set things aright in the end...

I found that glimmer, as concerns the present topic, here (if the claims are to be believed):

ErgoExergy

εUCG™ has obvious environmental advantages as a coal recovery method: there is no scarring of the earth as there is with open-cast mining; no large tracts of land are buried under overburden rock and tailings damps; there is no acid mine drainage caused by reactions of the overburden rock with atmospheric water and air.

I find it fascinating that we only see viable alternative fuel sources to gasoline is when great profits could be made from this new fuel source which is in fact not so new. Now factories are being made, goverments are offering incentives to invest in this, while 100s of world changing energy ideas are pushed aside. We deserve these high gas prices when the public won't demand any of the alternative ideas to fuel and energy.

I hate to tell you but the hemp farming bizzness was destroyed after wwII. by none other than the chemical industrial complex..ripping mountian tops off in the u.s. is more viable than growing a weed that can give us oil/from its seed/and renewable to boot..oh crap! even FORD had his early cars to run on hemp oil and now the green people use fast food waist oil to burn in there cars..git real...its a death cycle and we cant git anough of it...hey look at me! my SUV runs on ***t woo-wee! now the socker mom can aford to make an xtra trip to wall mart...humans are paracite's on a globe thats soon to shake there skanky ass's off like a dog furiously scracthing its flee's.

Coal and oil have been running the motors for all of our electric needs for the past 125 years. It fuels our autos and powers televisions and computers - all great inventions harnessing planet earth's resources for our convenience and amusement. This has given rise to a new species of sedentary homopecciari quite separate from the original human race. This devolved and overly domesticated omnivore appears to be the main consumer of our coal reserves as well as the beneficiary of its labor. Not surprisingly, it is often a very portly creature addicted to physical comfort and tends to beget even larger offspring specifically programmed for perpetual consumer binging. Instead of endlessly torturing the green earth to provide for us, why not harness the vast saturated energy compounds stored under the hide of our own homopecciari? If whale blubber can be used to make lamps, we should be able to power several hours of television time from each slice of blubber cut from the homopecciari. Just place a few dozen on a giant skillet, fry, and drain the lipids into cruder-than-crude-oil barrels. Popping a few cellulite decorated thighs into the furnace should heat the home on chilly nights. Or let it dry and smear it on your home's exterior for insulation throughout the long winter months. The government will provide incentives, like mortgage breaks, for the adult homopecciari who sell their children to BP for lard harvesting. Instead of pumping gas, our nation’s soccer moms can unbag a carton of whining petrol pudgies, drop them in a sizzling gasified oven and spew the human paraffin directly into their humming SUV. The run-off will conveniently coat the cement cracks in their driveways without environmental dilemmas.

Cannibalgod70 has a very good point..free liposuction for fat people!..portley people croweding state liposuction stations and giving there all and free botox shots to make them all look like paris hilton when they leave...corn/ethonal/hemp! wind power? screw that! WE got FAT..and lots of it right hear in the good old U>S>A>..at least a centurys worth..if you dont belive me just peek out your window and check out your neibore..yep! just as i thought,,there ankle is as big as your waist!..and god forbid i tell you to take a gander at the check out counter at a country K-MART..ok i know a lot of heavey beathers are gonna come down on me for saying this..but the earth is starting to wobble in its orbit because of all the fat people in the usa...and the 2012 people know that this country is going to tip over the world and were gonna end up frozen at the bottom of the world/ formerly known as the ant artic...and only a hab therey and nuclear blast down there can free our fat ass's..and i really caint see any other nation on the globe wanting to let that geni out of the bottle after BUSH.

www.energybulletin.net...

On unconventional oil, 80% is in the Western Hemisphere. Chavez has driven Venezuela into a ditch; their production is falling. Oil shale has the energy density of shaving cream, one-third that of phone books, and has never provided more than 1/10,000th of global energy. Yes, the Canadians will get tar sands to 3 Mb/d, which will help. But U.S. tar sands are not water soluble, occur in thin crusts and have never been produced commercially. A 50,000 b/d coal-to-liquids plant would cost $6 billion, take 3 years to build, and aggravate climate change.

“The report also seems somewhat cavalier about North American gas constraints: do you mean to suggest that 3 tanker loads of LNG will glide into American shores each day by 2020? From where, exactly? Half of US domestic gas is from wells less than 3 years old, which means we have to replace with new drilling 25 billion cubic ft/d in the next 1000 days.

“That's one of the hard truths I find missing here.

“My biggest regret is that the NPC report fails to communicate the essential nature of the competition between depletion of existing wells and investment in new ones. Depletion is tireless, quick, inevitable, relentless, and automatic. Investment is costly, slow, uncertain, sporadic, and optional. This is a horse race, with one winner.

Also a nice official looking documentary here :
abc.net.au...

I just thought I should post these things, no comment from me, all I could say is "We're doomed !"

[edit on 28-8-2007 by pai mei]

Originally posted by pai mei
Also a nice official looking documentary here :
abc.net.au...

And it only has to look 'official' for the peak freak crowd to jump all over it.

I just thought I should post these things, no comment from me, all I could say is "We're doomed !"

Why are we doomed? Why do the peak oilers keep getting their date wrong and then extending it without ever mentioning the fact that they have been getting it wrong for decades now? Why are we still finding five barrels of oil for every three we are using and why is this possible when we are spending smaller and smaller percentages of profit to look for oil? Why does even the most pessimistic data indicate that we will have more than enough oil for at least another fifty years?

Stellar