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Ever hear of coal bed methane? It takes no conversion process and is pumped directly into the natural gas pipelines. It's done all over the country. Other coal bed gasses might need some conversion to make them work. Electric generating plants are EXPENSIVE. The latest numbers being kicked around are in the neighborhood of $2,500-$5,000 per kilowatt of capacity. In case your wondering, the average house needs between 3 and 6 average KW's to keep going. That doesn't include the cost of fuel and power lines to get the power to your house. That puts a 1,000 megawatt power plant some where in the price range of $2.5 - $5 billion. If you're an investor would you risk that much money on an unproven technology? I didn't think so. Electric utilities WANT high efficiency power plants. Several years ago it was said that roughly 1/3 of your power bill was the cost of the power plant, 1/3 was the cost of power lines and substations to get it to your home, and 1/3 was the cost of the fuel to make the whole thing move. I'm guessing that with the rapid increase in the cost of fuels that ration has been twisted to more like 1/4, 1/4, 1/2. Some factors that get in the way of making plants more efficient: 1. You CANNOT replace any major piece of equipment in a plant with going through the whole regulatory headaches for New Source Review. This applies to both power plants AND oil refinery boilers. You can increase the efficiencies AND reducing the polution levels by changing out the boilers, but the environmentalists would shut you down. The increased costs in the madated Maximum Available Control Technology (MACT) would scuttle the project. 2. Many high efficiency proposals have yet to be scaled up to utility sizes. Coal gasification for combined cycle gas turbines is a good example. Another is fuidized bed boilers for using "junk" coal and other burnable fuels. Imagine being able to throw your junk tires into the local power plant? It's being done, but only on smaller plants. 3. Nobody wants a plant in their back yard. This forces the utilities to build plants far away from the loads (which creates other significant problems) and having to build expensive power lines to get the power to where you want it. I think the whole energy mess is just going to get worse, and not better as time goes on. China used to export oil, and now they import a LOT of it to support their growing economy. Same thing for India and many other growing 2nd world countries. The same thing has happened to the copper and steel markets. 1 billion chinese are now wanting cars and homes with electric lights. Go figure. Diesel fuel costs are now over $0.50 MORE than gasoline in our area. The oil refineries are maxed out, and selling a LOT more than they ever have. Gasoline is expensive, diesel is really expensive, and gas is moving up there really fast. Coal has also jumped up in cost lately as well as utilities have shifted from burning gas to burning more coal. There is no cheap fuel out there. It's going to cost more. You're going to pay more. As for bio fuels / syn fuels / alternative fuels? We need them all. Some make economic sense today. Some are hoped that they'll make economic sense tomorrow but need a helping hand today with subsidies, and some simply don't make a lot of sense but are politically expedient to support. Mark in Utah
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