On July 31, The Herald- Dispatch said that plans to build a coal-to-liquids (CTL) plant in Marshall County are "good news for West Virginia, and it's good news for America 's efforts to develop new sources of energy, especially in ways that lessen its dependence on foreign sources."
On the other hand, it's not such good news for those alarmed about global warming, nor those who are sick at the destruction already wrought by coal mining in West Virginia. Building a whole fleet of CTL refineries, as the National Coal Council has proposed we do at a price of $211 billion, would increase coal mining by half -- just to replace 10 percent of the oil we use. The CTL production process also uses and contaminates great quantities of water. And it emits twice the carbon dioxide of the petroleum fuel it replaces. According to the EPA, even if they managed to sequester all of the gas emitted in the production process, a doubtful achievement, the resulting fuel still emits 3.7 percent more carbon dioxide in tailpipe emissions than petroleum diesel.
There are also economic questions. Building these plants is very expensive, and so the developers are asking for a variety of public subsidies. But why should our tax money be used to build polluting plants just to please the coal industry? And costs will no doubt rise when sequestration is mandated, or cap-and-trade permits auctioned, or carbon taxes imposed -- one of these is sure to happen before long.
Indeed, we do need to find ways to reduce and eventually eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. But the truly clean energy sources, primarily wind and solar technologies, are growing fast and getting cheaper even as fossil fuels get more and more expensive. This is so despite stingy and uncertain subsidies.
But, you say, wind and solar may be all fine and good for producing electricity, but what about fuel for our vehicles? Here's the interesting thing: electric engines are so much more efficient than internal combustion engines -- by about a factor of four -- that we'd be better off converting to an electric fleet even if we burned coal to produce the electricity. It's high time we got started on this major undertaking, and on ramping up the percentage of our electricity that comes from the wind and the sun.
There is also much to be done in conservation and improving the efficiency of current technologies. There will be hundreds of thousands of jobs in these fields, and we West Virginians can claim our share if we can just tear loose the bonds with which King Coal has tied us to the tracks leading back to the 19th century.
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