(cross-posted at Deny My Freedom and Daily Kos)
A couple of days ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an article on the front page about Sasol, a South African company that makes most of its revenue from selling oil. However, this is not your typical crude oil that’s drilled in the Middle East. Instead, it’s synthetic fuel that is created via a scientific process known as the Fischer-Tropsch process, so named after the two German scientists who discovered the process. The introduction in the Journal article gives one a broad idea of what the process is about:
Every day, conveyor belts haul about 120,000 metric tons of coal into an industrial complex here two hours east of Johannesburg.
The facility — resembling a nuclear power plant, with concrete silos looming over nearby potato farms — superheats the coal to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It adds steam and oxygen, cranks up the pressure, and pushes the coal through a series of chemical reactions.
Then it spits out something extraordinary: 160,000 barrels of oil a day.
Even a Democratic favorite in the netroots, Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana, has advocated a similar program. All in all, it seems like a winner – it would most likely reduce our dependence on Middle East crude oil, which is often subjected to geopolitical shocks from the instability within the region. However, as I previously wrote about ethanol, this doesn’t solve the core problem – pollution – and it could actually end up hurting the environment more than it helps it.
For starters, here’s a brief description of what the Fischer-Tropsch process actually does.
Synthesis gas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, is reacted in the presence of an iron or cobalt catalyst; much heat is evolved, and such products as methane, synthetic gasoline and waxes, and alcohols are made, with water or carbon dioxide produced as a byproduct. An important source of the hydrogen-carbon monoxide gas mixture is the gasification of coal.
During his days in power, Hitler used synthetic fuel to power the German army, particularly the Luftwaffe. The Fischer-Tropsch process helped the country greatly because it was largely isolated from the world under the dictator’s reign. Isolation was also the main reason that Sasol was able to get its start, despite the generally prohibitive costs of producing oil from coal – the apartheid regime made it difficult for South Africa to obtain oil through conventional means.
Nowadays, though, the idea of converting coal to fuel is gaining traction around the rest of the world. With energy companies flush with cash due to rising oil costs, they are able to sign huge deals to finance the beginning of such factories:
A unit of Canadian construction giant SNC-Lavalin Inc. (TSX:SNC) and Houston-based DKRW Advanced Fuels LLC have formed a strategic alliance to develop, design and build coal-to-liquid fuel projects each worth more than $1 billion US.
The companies announced Wednesday that DKRW Advanced Fuels and SNC-Lavalin GDS Inc. of Houston and SNC-Lavalin Constructors Inc. of Bothell, Wash. will develop the projects, beginning with the first proposed plant in Wyoming, a major U.S. coal-producing state.
Given the geographic region, it’s no surprise that Wyoming is going to be the site of this particular project’s first plant – the state has the second-largest coal reserves in the western U.S. However, the state with the largest reserves in the region – and the country – is Montana. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that there may be no bigger proponent of synthetic fuels in America than Schweitzer. In a 60 Minutes interview in February of this year, Schweitzer expounded upon the concept of ‘synfuel’ and what it would mean for us:
“Probably about half of eastern Montana has coal underneath it,” Schweitzer explains.
Montana is already mining a small fraction of its coal.
[…]
“If we got to 20 of these kinds of pits, we could produce a serious amount of energy for the future of this country,” the governor said.
It’s not enough to completely break our addiction to foreign oil, but a start. Most coal today is used for electricity but the governor’s plan is to turn Montana’s billions of tons of untapped coal into a liquid diesel fuel for our cars.
The synthetic fuel also burns cleaner. From the governor’s website on the issue:
When coal is gasified, rather than burned as at conventional coal plants, impurities such as sulfur and mercury can be stripped out of the gas stream, instead of otherwise being emitted into the air. The resulting fuels burn virtually free of these pollutants. Sulfur-free fuel means less smog and acid rain, among many other benefits.
So, converting coal to fuel would wean us of our dependence on the Middle East for our main source of energy. It’d utilize a resource that America has a lot more of, as the graphic above shows, so that we would be able to utilize coal in this manner for a long time. The anchors on CNBC repeatedly noted how America has more coal than Saudi Arabia has oil. The demand for synthetic fuel would likely drop the existing prices of crude oil currently in the market. In addition, it doesn’t have the efficiency drawbacks that other alternatives, such as ethanol, have. The actual burning process has far less harmful chemicals in it. And it has the potential to create hundreds or thousands of new jobs. From the Journal:
By the time the facilities were completed in the early 1980s, international oil prices were collapsing. The project was nonetheless a success for the white-dominated apartheid government because international sanctions were restricting South Africa’s ability to buy foreign oil. The plants managed to stay profitable by continually boosting efficiency and expanding their end products to include plastics, fertilizers and explosives.
Besides the government loans, Sasol at various times received cash payments from the government when oil prices fell below a certain level. It eventually paid back the loans and stopped receiving subsidies for its coal-to-oil business by 2000.
Today, Secunda is a buzzing industrial hub with 16,000 employees, miles of interlocking pipes and cables, and eight colossal silos. The silos, each big enough to contain a football field, cool steam involved in the conversion process. Fuel trucks wait along the edge of the facility to fill up with gasoline. Nearby mines produce more than 40 million metric tons of coal a year — as much as all of Illinois.
Outside the plant gates, Secunda has a boomtown feel. It has some 35,000 people, a BMW dealership and a multistory casino hotel called Graceland designed to evoke the “grand old age of Colonial America.”
So…what’s the problem?
Pictured above is one of the main issues: surface mining. This is the kind of mining for coal that is being utilized in Montana, and it completely destroys the surrounding environment. The land that is planning on being mined in Montana used to be under federal control, but under the Clinton administration, another plot of land was exchanged, giving the state control over its use. The effects of surface mining aren’t that great, either:
Surface mining (1) eliminates surface vegetation, (2) can permanently change topography, (3) permanently and drastically alters soil and subsurface geological structure, and (4) disrupts surface and subsurface hydrologic regimes. Secondary mining impacts range from urban development in support of mining to creation of offroad networks for exploration activities. Surface subsidence following long-wall deep mining can dewater stream reaches and divert flows into different surface stream channels that are not adjusted to such increased flows. Altered patterns and delivery rhythms can be expected as well as changes in water quality.
Off-site impacts such as stream pollution can be significant. Water quality impacts can generally be controlled during active mining, but many acid-potent coal reserves cannot be mined with current technology without “residual acid seepage” requiring “uninterrupted perpetual treatment” in order to protect large river systems. Backfilled, reclaimed surface mine sites thus constitute artificial, porous “geological recharge areas” where infiltrating water percolates through the fill and emerges as very acid seeps or springs that often flow even during drought when natural waters dry up. Many receiving streams have low alkalinities (<10 mg/L), and great volumes or distances are required to neutralize even small mine flows that may carry 1,000 to 2,000 mg/L of acid.
Another problem is that when the synthetic fuel is burned, it contains less toxic chemicals – but it contains a lot more carbon dioxide, the main culprit of the global warming effect. The WSJ notes these worries:
The Natural Resources Defense Council, a U.S.-based environmental advocacy group, estimates that the production and use of gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel and other fuels from crude oil release about 27.5 pounds of carbon dioxide per gallon. The production and use of a gallon of liquid fuel originating in coal emit about 49.5 pounds of carbon dioxide, they estimate. Even some boosters of the coal-to-oil plants describe them as carbon-dioxide factories that produce energy on the side.
“Before deciding whether to invest scores — perhaps hundreds — of billions of dollars in a new industry like coal-to-liquids, we need a much more serious assessment of whether this is an industry that should proceed at all,” said David Hawkins, director of the Climate Center at the Natural Resources Defense Council, at a recent U.S. Senate hearing.
This is a serious issue indeed – it may make things cheaper for us, but it’s going to push our planet towards the brink at an even faster rate. The problem that lies within many of these alternative fuel strategies is evident here as well – to create an alternative energy fuel source, the production process itself will give off pollution, along with the end product. Schweitzer believes he has a solution for this dilemma:
But Schweitzer has promised not to do that. “This spent carbon dioxide, we have a home for it. Right back into the earth, 5,000 feet deep,” the governor explains.
He plans to sell that carbon dioxide to oil companies that use it to boost the amount of oil they can pump. “It’s called enhanced oil recovery. It’s worth money to the oil business,” Schweitzer said.
What the governor is advocating is something known as carbon sequestration – storing excess carbon dioxide below the ground. While it seems like a good idea, a study has shown that there are serious environmental problems with such a process:
Following CO2 breakthrough, samples showed sharp drops in pH (6.5-5.7), pronounced increases in alkalinity (100-3,000 mg/L as HCO3) and Fe (30-1,100 mg/L), and significant shifts in the isotopic compositions of H2O, dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC), and CH4.
Geochemical modeling indicates that brine pH would have dropped lower but for the buffering by dissolution of carbonate and iron oxyhydroxides.
This rapid dissolution of carbonate and other minerals could ultimately create pathways in the rock seals or well cements for CO2 and brine leakage. Dissolution of minerals, especially iron oxyhydroxides, could mobilize toxic trace metals and, where residual oil or suitable organics are present, the injected CO2 could also mobilize toxic organic compounds.
Environmental impacts could be major if large brine volumes with mobilized toxic metals and organics migrated into potable groundwater.
And storing the carbon dioxide underground isn’t going to change carbon dioxide emissions much – to reduce our emissions by 10%, we’d have to convert 1/3 of our farmland into forestlands where the CO2 emissions would be stored. Schweitzer also mentions selling the excess carbon dioxide to oil companies, but that simply serves to accelerate the problem of our dependence on oil of any kind. Finally, the topic of the cost of such a facility would need to be addressed.
Schweitzer’s advocacy of coal-to-fuel was hailed by Kos when it was introduced. The fact of the matter, though, is that creating oil from coal via the Fischer-Tropsch process will have several negative effects on the environment. Furthermore, it doesn’t address the need to move to sources of energy that do not generate pollution whatsoever, such as solar power. People may think that it’s a long-term solution to the problem, but when one thinks on the larger scale of a planetary timeline, a few hundred years is nothing. We need to become independent of oil, no matter where it comes from.