The Nazi's did indeed come up with a process to convert coal to high quality gasoline. The cost of production needed to go above $39 a barrel for the oil companies to make a profit doing it. It is way past that at $140+ a barrel.
The Governor of Montana has said that the coal to gasoline thing is a great idea: he's waiting for someone to step up to the plate and do it. He also said that there is enough coal in the Montana area to make gasoline for the next 200+ years. The South Africans were on the network news a few nights ago and showed that it could be done, and they are successfully doing it.
If it is a great idea and is workable, why don’t we have it? The problem is twofold:
1.) You have to get the coal out of the ground in huge quantities, which means strip mining.
2.) You have to build a huge refinery to process the coal.
The obstacle to both items is the environmentalists. Strip mining is a nasty, ugly process that costs big $$$ to reclaim the land when it is done. Plus nobody wants a refinery in their community. They stink, are ugly, and they pollute the air. There hasn’t been a oil refinery built in the US in over 20 years. The environmentalists and the cost of building the refinery will hold this cheap process back until someone with some sense and political power makes it turn around. Meanwhile we all suffer every time we fill up or cars & trucks.
Maybe one of the key issues for the up and coming Presidential campaign should be a rational plan for a coal to gasoline energy policy. It might temp some of us to vote for a candidate we otherwise wouldn’t give the time of day.
So, if we were to take the plunge and go ahead with the strip mining and building of refineries, you're saying that the cost of coal-to-gasoline (CTG) would no longer be cost-prohibitive versus oil-to-gasoline (OTG)? Well, if CTG costs $149 a barrel, we're really not far away from that price right now, considering that oil just dropped $10/barrel from almost that exact price to $135 just today. It might ALREADY be a cost-effective alternative in the next few months for us to go ahead and do it.
Besides, while I can understand and agree that strip mining is very destructive and hard/expensive to recover, the refinery process can be improved so as not to be such a major pollution issue. They're already putting into place the cleaner-burning coal power plant technologies that are being used for generating electricity, so I don't imagine it would be too far of a jump from applying that cleaner technology over to another use of coal (in refineries). That would certainly rock.
On the flipside, while CTG is a groovy idea, it still doesn't solve the issue of the very nature of internal combustion engines as major air pollution sources. We still wind up dependent upon fossil fuels for basic transportation, and so it only delays our need to face up to a crisis until a later point in time. Sooner or later, the same issue of "what can we use to make cheap gasoline now" will come up again. We really need something besides gasoline as a primary means of transportation fuel.
And, just as well, who's to say that the gasoline produced in these CTG refineries will STAY in the US and not just be shipped right out to other places like oil companies have ALREADY been doing for so long with so much of our domestic oil?
I'm half tempted to rip the 302 out of my mustang and drop an electric motor in. I have seen some really trippy vids on youtube and google over the last two days that have totally changed my mind about electric cars.