The New York Times, June 23, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/23/opinion/23goodell.html

Our Black

Future

By JEFF GOODELL

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 Nazis, 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.

Put aside the question of whether raising fuel efficiency standards 

for vehicles could achieve the same goal at far less cost. Instead, 

let's consider the wisdom of substituting one fossil fuel for 

another. We already burn a billion tons of coal a year - it generates 

more than half the electricity in the United States. But thanks in 

part to ever bigger, more powerful equipment, mining is destroying 

vast swaths of Appalachia while providing fewer well-paying jobs.

 From 1984 to 2004, the average coal miner's per-shift productivity 

more than doubled, while wages declined by 20 percent (adjusted for 

inflation). If we simply increase consumption, we will be condemning 

large areas of the country, including eastern Kentucky and southern 

West Virginia, to national sacrifice zones. In addition, 

coal-to-liquids plants consume enormous quantities of water - three 

barrels, on average, for every barrel of fuel produced. In many 

places, especially the coal-rich but water-poor Western prairies, 

this is not a good deal.

Then there's global warming. To avoid dangerous climate change, many 

scientists argue that we must cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50 

percent to 70 percent by 2050. Coal, the most carbon-intensive fossil 

fuel, is responsible for nearly 40 percent of American emissions of 

carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. Since 1990, carbon dioxide 

emissions from fossil-fuel power plants have increased by 27 percent, 

compared to 19 percent from all sources nationally. Coal-to-liquids 

plants will only accelerate this trend. Depending on the technology 

used, refining coal can release 50 percent to 100 percent more carbon 

dioxide than refining petroleum.

In theory, carbon dioxide can be captured and sequestered underground 

in tapped-out oil fields or deep saline aquifers. But this method 

will work only in regions where the geology is suitable, and even 

there, good sequestration space is limited. Moreover, injecting 

carbon dioxide underground can set off earthquakes. And the gas is an 

asphyxiant: we risk deadly accidents should the millions of tons we 

would need to bury escape their underground prisons. In 1986, at Lake 

Nyos in Cameroon, 300,000 tons of naturally occurring carbon dioxide 

that had been trapped in the lake suddenly rose to the surface and 

formed a misty cloud, suffocating 1,700 people.

Coal-to-liquids plants might make sense for generating back-up fuel 

for the military. And there are certainly ways coal can play a role 

in reducing the demand for oil without destroying the climate. 

Instead of building coal-to-liquids plants, it would be smarter to 

push for the development of plug-in hybrid cars, which have larger 

batteries than conventional hybrids, allowing them to replace 

gasoline with grid-generated electricity and to emit 65 percent less 

carbon dioxide than conventional cars. But coal boosters are less 

interested in promoting this path, in part because it would undercut 

the industry's goal of becoming "the OPEC of coal." The very

phrase 

suggests the industry's monopolistic impulses.

The biggest problem with our bounty of coal is not what it does to 

our mountains or the atmosphere, but what it does to our minds. It 

preserves the illusion that we don't have to change our lives. Given 

the profound challenges we face with the end of cheap oil and the 

arrival of global warming, this is a dangerous fantasy.

If we had less coal, we might replace the 19th-century notion that we 

can drill and burn our way to prosperity with a more modern view of 

efficiency and sustainability. Instead of spending billions of 

dollars each year to subsidize tapping out yet another finite 

resource, we'd pour that money into solar energy, biofuels and other 

renewable resources.

We'd be creating jobs in new industries, not protecting them in old 

ones. And we'd understand that the real fuel of the future is not 

coal but creativity.

Jeff Goodell is the author of "Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind 

America's Energy

Future."