Air Force wants to see coal fuel take off
On a wind-swept base near the Missouri River, the Air Force has launched an ambitious plan to wean itself from foreign oil by turning to an unlikely energy source: coal.
At its Malmstrom base in central Montana, the Air Force wants to build the first piece of what it hopes will be a nationwide network of facilities to convert domestic coal into cleaner-burning synthetic fuel.
Air Force officials said the plants could help neutralize a national security threat by tapping into the country’s abundant coal reserves. By offering itself as a partner in the Malmstrom plant, the Air Force hopes to prod Wall Street investors — nervous over coal’s role in climate change — to sink money into plants nationwide.
“We’re going to be burning fossil fuels for a long time, and there’s three times as much coal in the ground as there are oil reserves,” said Air Force Assistant Secretary William Anderson. “Guess what? We’re going to burn coal.”
How novel.
LOL at the pic. While reading, I was picturing someone stuffing coal into a fuel tank (which was making me giggle), so the picture fit right into my imaginings…
Funny pic.
University of MD is creating Ethanol from garbage. Talk about a renewable resource.
Therapist1
Anheuser-Busch has been doing just that for years.
R/
Reminds me of the Star Trek blooper reel…showing Scotty shoveling coal into the engines of the Enterprise.
Interesting effort for the Air Force. Back in 1974, during the so-called Energy Crisis, my husband and I wrote a book for the Center For Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, outlining the various energy options available at the time. I got to write the chapter about coal gasification. Efforts were underway to gasify coal in situ, right in the mine, so that the big heavy coal itself would not have to be removed with great effort, just the gas produced from it, presumably with less effort and cost. My husband says that the ideal currently is coal liquifaction. Don’t know exactly how this works, but it’s probably easier and better than gasification, or they wouldn’t be doing it.
We wrote that book in a week in Jamaica, laboring away every day while our employers played on the beaches and the rivers. We got one day off, to boat down what they call the Rio Grande in a flat-bottomed boat, over a riverbed that was sometimes only six inches deep.
Beautiful place, Jamaica. I guess.
Marianne
The Germans used coal to make fuel for their army and air force during the last two years of WWII. When the U.S. Air Force took out the Ploesti oil fields, oil supplies got very tight for the Germans.
The process has been around a long time and has been improved on. It is commercial with oil at $50/barrel.
If we start moving in the direction of high mpg diesel cars in this country, coal to oil and bio diesel could give this country a big boost toward less dependence on foreign oil.
If that pic is accurate, there will be no more worries about cockpit bird strikes. How does the steam from the boiler turn the turbines?
Yeah, but it all comes down to cost. Airplanes are not cheap to operate and anywhere we can shave a few shekels off the price per passenger mile, we need to. All of these alt energy schema have that same core problem: they all make the fuel more expensive than the fuel it is supposed to replace. Which means the replacement never actually happens (except for maybe a small community of hippies in Berkely who have told gas stations that they are “not welcome” in Berkeley).
I’m holding out for shale oil. That could do it for us. Doesn’t so much solve the problem as puts it off for a generation or so, but baby steps.
This is the Fischer-Tropsch process, and Jimmy is right that the Germans used this process in WWII. It’s a great way to convert carbon sources into liquid fuel. It requires a very large heat source though. You can run it off the surplus steam from a power plant for improved efficiency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_process
Yeah, but all of it is still fossilized sunshine. We _will_ run out sooner or later. ‘Druther use the remaining petroleum for chemical feedstocks, and build nuke plants, lotsa nuke plants, for electricity.
And, yes, fast breeders, too, with all of that icky plutonium and thorium.
Until we get solar power satellites, or the humans I dislike (most of ‘em) die back to a reasonable level.
Recycle the steam heat from a nuclear powerplant to liquify coal for motor fuel. That should send the environmental mental cases into fits of apoplexy. I like it.
We have a local guy who has a Segway and he was bragging about how Green it was, until I showed him how much coal had to be burned to create the electricity for him to recharge its batteries. Turns out he’d be cleaner if he used a chainsaw motor to power it.