As the price of oil rises, coal company executives smell a huge opportunity: they are planning to ramp up a new global industry to turn coal into liquid fuels (diesel, kerosene and jet fuel), plus basic feedstocks for the chemical industry to make plastics, fertilizers, solvents, pesticides, and more). The coal-to-chemicals industry is already going gangbusters in China.
U.S. coal companies like Peabody and Arch plan to combine well-known coal-to-liquids technology and rapidly-evolving coal-to-chemicals technologies with untested methods of capturing carbon dioxide (or CO2, the main global-warming gas), compressing it into a liquid, and injecting it a mile below ground, hoping it will stay there forever. (Burying CO2 is called "carbon capture and storage" or CCS.) If coal executives succeed in convincing the public to pay for all this, low- carbon renewable energy systems and waste-free "green chemistry" will be sidelined for decades to come.
The Coming of Liquefied Coal
