Wrong Side of the Argument

The Greens are going to lose their fight with coal. For one thing their story is wrong. Coal is a lot cleaner than it used to be and newer technologies are about to make it cleaner still. More importantly, coal is the only available source for the worlds increasing energy needs over the next couple of decades. Oil won’t support the growth from China or India. Wind and solar certainly will not. And only coal can free us from dependence on petroleum imports any time soon. Coal’s only real problem is carbon dioxide and that’s only if you buy the man made global warming argument. People increasingly do not. They are for sure not prepared to wreck the global economy in a futile attempt to avoid it.

The case for coal is compelling. If you insist on low CO2 emissions it can be sequestered and stored underground. People claiming it has never been tested commercially are either poorly informed or not telling the truth. Since 2000 Dakota Gas has been piping CO2 from a coal gasification plant to a Canadian oil field for use in an enhanced recovery project, the largest in the world. In the future CO2 could be used as feed stock for algae farms, maybe even in greenhouses. A better idea is to use nuclear power for heat to gasify the coal. That could take CO2 emissions back to the level of the 1960s, produce hydrocarbons at costs competitive on today’s market, provide an ample supply of electricity, and make the US a net energy exporter all at the same time.

Diesel is the cleanest liquid fuel on the market today. Diesel powered cars get 30% better mileage than gasoline and more than twice that of ethanol. Since 2006 we have phased in low sulfur diesel at a substantial price penalty but South African diesel made from coal is cheaper and has less than a third the sulfur. With congress about to enact ever stricter mileage and emissions standards diesel will make more and more sense, but we need to get the price down. Coal is the way to do it. If we pair coal with nuclear we could power the world for the foreseeable future until better technologies come along, and do it far more cleanly. Dirty coal indeed!

It might even be a way to make all those wind and solar farms useful. The rap on them is the electricity they provide is not only expensive, it’s unreliable. While the wind is blowing and the sun shining they could be used to power coal gasification plants and produce natural gas. The natural gas could be used for standby power. There are even some promising technologies out there for using wind and solar to produce hydrocarbons from CO2 and water. That’s a few years down the road and we’d have to be careful. Plants won’t survive in air depleted of CO2. I’m not in favor of this until it becomes economically viable but if we insist on throwing public money at “renewables” we might as well get something in return.

Greens are an important constituency for Barack Obama and for Democrats in Congress, but a lot of Congressional Democrats are from coal states. They know the economy runs on cheap fuel and despite their rhetoric they recognize the limitations of “alternative” energy. They also like being reelected. They will toss the greens a bone or two with some big time subsidies but they realize the nation has to get its fuel from somewhere and they know coal is the only real place to get it. Obama’s proposed Energy Secretary is a Nobel Prize winning physicist who worries about both anthropogenic climate warming and nuclear waste disposal issues. I suspect he also knows we have got to have real answers for serious short term needs. If we don’t get them Obama will most likely be a one term president. He wouldn’t like that. Neither would the greens.