No subsidy for a filthy fuel
THE EFFORT to reduce US dependence on Persian Gulf oil often overlaps with efforts to reduce the greenhouse gases of fossil fuels, since improved efficiency and renewable energy achieve both goals. But one proposal for replacing oil -- by using coal as a raw material to produce motor fuel -- has many advocates in Congress even though it would actually increase overall carbon dioxide emissions. In the energy bill now pending on Capitol Hill, Congress should reject any subsidies for liquefied coal.
Nazi Germany advanced a 1920s technology for liquefied coal when it lost foreign petroleum sources in World War II. In response to the oil crisis of the 1970s, the US government in 1980 tried its hand at liquefied coal with a $15 billion Synthetic Fuels Corporation, which went bust a few years later when world oil prices fell.
The coal industry wants help from Uncle Sam because liquefied coal is still far too costly to be competitive. A recent MIT study on coal estimated that it would cost $70 billion to build the plants needed to replace just 10 percent of US gasoline consumption. Bills before Congress would provide government-backed loans for plant construction, subsidy protection against drops in oil prices, and a long-term contract to supply the Air Force with the alternative fuel. Coal-state lawmakers, including Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, are pushing for the measures.
All of this largess, though, would replace gasoline with a fuel that would generate about twice the carbon dioxide emissions of gasoline. Even if the plants were built so that their carbon dioxide emissions could be captured and then stored underground, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that liquefied coal would still emit about 4 percent more carbon dioxide than gasoline.
The United States has immense coal reserves -- enough to make it the Saudi Arabia of this fossil fuel -- so proposals for liquefied coal have become the unkillable Draculas of US energy policy. Instead of pursuing this highly polluting misuse of coal, though, the industry and its allies in Congress should be doing more to promote the use of gasified coal as a replacement for conventional coal in the generation of electricity. With carbon capture and storage, this process achieves great reductions in greenhouse gases.
Through such innovations, coal can and should play a role whenever the United States tries seriously to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions, which are almost 25 percent of the world's total. But when it comes to replacing gasoline, the government should be subsidizing an alternative like cellulosic ethanol, which emits 90 percent less carbon dioxide than gasoline -- and not liquefied coal, which would just speed the warming of the planet.
