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Clouds From Chinese Coal Cast a Long Shadow

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From the NYT: "NOT long ago, I stood at the bottom of a strip mine in Wyoming and looked up at a 70-foot-high seam of coal. It had a brownish cast and crumbled when I touched it. I could see bits of woody fiber, the remains of a huge swamp that existed there 50 million years ago. I imagined this great coal seam rolling under the prairie for hundreds of miles. "We're the OPEC of coal," the head of a coal industry trade group told me later. "Now that the need for greater energy independence has become a universal political slogan, every county commissioner in America has an idea of how we can break free of our Middle Eastern oil shackles: ethanol, hydrogen, solar panels on the roof of every Hummer! Still, it's hard not to be optimistic when you're standing in front of a 70-foot seam of coal. It's not hype; it's real. Is the bridge to energy independence paved in black? "During World War II, the ***, who were desperate to find a way to power their tanks with coal, pursued technology to transform coal into liquid fuels. In South Africa today, one energy company, Sasol, produces about 150,000 barrels a day of diesel from coal. "We could do far better in the United States. According to a recent report by the National Coal Council, an advisory board to the Department of Energy that is dominated by coal executives, if America invested $211 billion in coal-to-liquids refineries over the next 20 years, we could make 2.6 million barrels of diesel per day, enhancing the American oil supply by 10 percent. A number of coal-to-liquids plants are on the drawing boards in the United States, and China is eagerly pursuing this technology too." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/23/opinion/23goodell.html? Jeff Goodell is the author of "Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future." Dave
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