An interesting use for Coal

This article in the Billings Gazette (Montana) talks about an interesting proposal:

Schweitzer wants to convert Otter Creek coal into liquid fuel
Montana acquired 533 million tons of federal coal near Ashland three years ago. A private company owns more than that interspersed checkerboard fashion among the state's holdings.

Both would like to develop that high-quality coal.

And there are others, too, who have ideas for turning the coal into energy, revenue and profits.

Because the price of oil is at unheard- of levels, and the United States needs alternative energy supplies, Gov. Brian Schweitzer has targeted an old/new process to turn the coal into diesel and jet fuel. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., has put tax incentives for the process into the new energy and highway bills, and several U.S. energy technology firms have perfected the method.

The missing ingredient is investment capital - billions of dollars worth.

In a recent interview, Schweitzer said "there are a great number of believers, potential partners, who will put their money down."

The process is called Fischer-Tropsch, named for the German scientists who developed the process in the 1920s for converting coal to diesel fuel, which later ran the Nazi war machine. In more recent decades, the process was used in South Africa to fuel its vehicles when the world would not trade with the apartheid nation. It still produces 150,000 barrels of fuel a day from coal. Energy technology firms in the United States and elsewhere have fine-tuned F-T to make both its process and products pollution-free.

"There are no smoke stacks," Schweitzer said.

And a bit about the process and the results:

The F-T fuels are also clean - no sulfur, mercury or arsenic. Those ingredients are recovered from the process and are marketable byproducts on their own.

Schweitzer said a 150,000 barrel per day unit would cost about $7.5 billion to build. However, F-T units can be built in modules, so a 22,000 barrel per day unit could cost $1.2 billion, he said.

One impetus for the development of the F-T fuel is that the Pentagon wants to have a single battlefield fuel. The F-T product can be used as jet fuel also.

There are some obstacles, the governor acknowledged: Several different companies hold different patents for the process. For example, a Tulsa, Okla., company, Syntroleum, uses a process with common air, rather than pure oxygen, which make it safer and less expensive to make.

And it is the cost that heretofore has kept the process in the experimental/pilot project stages. For F-T, the break even point comes when crude oil is more than $35 a barrel. Friday crude oil futures settled at $60.57 a barrel.

And finally this line:

He said using the Fischer-Tropsch method, one ton of coal would produce 1.5 barrels of diesel fuel. A barrel is 42 gallons. "It would cost less that a $1 per gallon to make that diesel," he said.

I ran into this article from an email list and the person who posted it was decrying that they were going to waste a whole ton of coal and only produce a barrel and a half of diesel. It is all a plot by the evil BushHalliburtonChenyOilConspiracyCabal (pauses to wipe spittle off face) Something went click in my brain and I started to Google some numbers, specifically the energy densities of coal and diesel. The weights as well. 1.5 * 42 = 63 Gallons of Diesel 63 * 7.3 = 460 Weight in Pounds of 63 Gallons of Diesel (rounded) 460 * 0.453 = 208 Weight in Kilograms of 63 Gallons of Diesel 208 * 45.3 = 942 Mega Joules of energy in this quantity of Diesel 1 * 907.18 = 907 Kilograms in One Ton of Coal 907 * 20 = 18140 Mega Joules of energy in this quantity of Coal (The Energy Density for Coal runs from 17.4MJ/kg to 23.8MJ/kg) What this shows me is that for one dollar of operating costs, they are extracting one gallon of very high-grade pure Diesel, some marketable byproducts and over half of the potential energy of the coal. Considering that the operating efficiency of a Coal Boiler is only about 40% at absolute best, this is a win/win situation. UPDATE: I started wondering just how big is a ton of coal. Solid Bituminous is 1346 Kilograms per Cubic Meter and there are 264.17 Gallons per Cubic Meter. Doing the math: 907 / 1346 = 0.67 Cubic Meters for One Ton of Coal 63 / 264.17 = 0.23 Cubic Meters for 63 Gallons of Diesel. We are looking at a reduction of one third in volume and considering that there are sellable byproducts from this reaction, not much is being wasted here...