Bad News: Scientists Make Cheap Gas From Coal

Bad News: Scientists Make Cheap Gas From Coal

Electric cars have been getting a lot of buzz lately, but a more immediately viable transportation fuel of the future could be liquid derived from coal. Scientists have devised a new way to transform coal into gas for your car using far less energy than the current process. The advance makes scaling up the environmentally unfriendly fuel more economical than greener alternatives.

If oil prices rise again, adoption of the new coal-to-liquid technology, reported this week in Science, could undercut adoption of electric vehicles or next-generation biofuels. And that’s bad news for the fight against climate change.

The new process could cut the energy cost of producing the fuel by 20 percent just by rejiggering the intermediate chemical steps, said co-author Ben Glasser of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. But coal-derived fuel could produce as much as twice as much CO2 as traditional petroleum fuels and at best will emit at least as much of the greenhouse gas.

This probably isn't such a good thing even though fuel prices might drop...I seen a story on the news tonight about aluminum or something that converted heat into light and wold be great for all the underdeveloped countries...apparently it was bad news for the coal industry...I looked for it but couldn't seem to find the story anywhere...I found a few old stories on converting heat to electricity using sound or nanomaterials...but I'm sure this was different...if anyone finds something on it or has heard something about let me know. Thanks.

[edit on 29/6/09 by CHA0S]

reply to post by CHA0S


Why is this bad news. It sounds like great news. It could be a quick way for the USA to become less foreign oil dependent. What could be bad about that?

They built a pilot plant in the early 70's to do the same thing. Then Opec dropped the price of oil and we forgot about doing this. The US has the largest reserves of coal in the world this is the smartest thing we could do.

Yeah.

And if we reintroduce lead we could slow global warming.

Haven't you heard that global warming has been debunked. Latest EPA report says that CO2 gases dropping not getting worse.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

So bring on the gas from coal.

Cap and trade is just another way to rob from the poor and give to the rich.

reply to post by rken2


I am not even going to touch that. I will say 100 years of internal combustion is long enough. It is time to move on.

Let me explain why this is bull crap. The economy of scale always works against the small engine fuel driven device. Why is because when you scale the same engine technology or fuel up to a larger scale it burns more efficiently. Electric cars use this economy of scale to their advantage. Ultimately the large efficiencies of electric cars will win out over small engines. It is simply physics. As electric moves more to alternatives it will not matter how cheap carbon fuels get. Everyone knows it is temporary and will still invest in the electric sector. Batteries will be cheaper, smaller and smarter. It make no difference how cheap fuels get. The engines that burn them will always be more efficient on a larger scale. Electric will for this reason win in the end. That is all.

[edit on 7/1/2009 by UFOTECH]

Butanol can be made by this process and puts out less CO2 then gasoline.
butanol also burns cleaner then gasoline and would not need all the additives
not required in gasoline. in-fact it could replace some that are now used in gasoline like ethanol that's required in Calif and other states to replace MTBE.

this would cut the use of corn and other FOODS used to make ethanol.
peswiki.com...:Butanol

Butanol at 85 percent strength can be used in cars designed for gasoline (petrol) without any change to the engine (unlike 85% ethanol)

And there have been Butanol fuel cells and research is ongoing on them.

Butanol would be a much better fuel cell fuel then hydrogen because it can be pumped from regular service station pumps and put into regular fuel tanks.
This would be a LOT cheaper and safer then building hydrogen filling stations and having pressurized hydrogen tanks in cars.

This would be the best transitional fuel from a internal combustion engine vehicle to a fuel cell vehicle economy as there would be no need to retrofit the excising fuel distribution system.

This also would allow the manufacture of heavier oils for lubrication use.
and Butanol can be used for aviation use where other fuels can not.