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"The world has at least a 300-year supply of coal."
—Kenneth Deffeyes in Hubbert's Peak, p. 173.
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The Liquid-Coal Backstop
Can technology make gasoline out of something
besides oil, and is there enough of that something to power a billion
automobiles? Sounds like a tall order. But the strangest part of the whole
peak-oil nonsense is this. The answer was discovered 80 years ago and is well
known to every one of the leading lights of peak oil. The answer is coal and the
Fischer-Tropsch process of turning it into gasoline.
This is not a theory; this is what powered the German Luftwaffe during WWII, and
much of South Africa when their oil was embargoed. In 1938 Germany consumed 44
million barrels of oil of which 10 million barrels was synfuel from coal. By
1943 their synfuel output had increased to 36 million barrels. That was their
response to an oil shortage. German Synfuel production
Of course, the process has been much refined, and today Montana could produce
gasoline for the equivalent of about $55 per barrel of oil. This has not yet
happened because investors are afraid the price of oil will fall back below $55
as soon as they build a coal-to-gasoline plant. Last time oil was this
expensive, the price did drop back to $20/barrel for a decade, so their fears
are justified. But if we start running out of oil, they would know the price
would not drop back below $55, and would build synfuel plants just like the
Germans did sixty years ago.
Making gasoline is possible, but is there enough coal? Deffeyes assures us that
"Worldwide coal reserves are large enough to continue present rates of
production for a few hundred years." Since world coal production provides two
thirds as much energy as world oil production, that's enough to get by for quite
some time. Deffeyes (the Princeton geologist) has now realized that this is what
will happen if oil runs out. The last sentence in the coal chapter of his second
peak-oil book reads as follows:
I hate to say it, but we likely will be forced to choose either
increased pollution from coal or doing without a significant portion of our
present-day energy supply. —Kenneth S. Deffeyes,
Beyond Oil, 2005.
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http://zfacts.com/p/863.html | 01/18/12 07:26 GMT
Modified: Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:47:01 GMT
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