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June 13, 2007 11:50 AM

TerraPass has a recent article on the folly of converting coal to liquid fuel:

One fact that sometimes goes unappreciated is that it takes energy to make energy. Or rather, it takes energy to deliver energy in a usable form. When you pump gas into your tank, you're purchasing a consumer product that sits at the end of a long supply chain. In the case of gasoline, that supply chain begins at an oil well; traverses oceans and continents via tanker and pipeline; routes through refineries and distribution centers; and finally fans out to gas stations all across the country.

Every step in that process requires energy for processing and transportation. The amount of energy varies dramatically depending on the nature of the product. There's a technical term for this: energy returned on energy invested, or EROEI. Which is just a fancy way of analyzing the energy content of a fuel based not just on what you get out of it, but also on what you put into it.

The NY Times ran an article, from which TerraPass quotes, that shows in a chart form how clearly inefficient coal-to-liquid-fuel is:

Liquefied coal is more than twice as carbon intensive as petroleum. If we assume that technologically unproven and extremely expensive carbon sequestration technology is used to capture some of the excess emissions, coal is still roughly as bad as petroleum.

Read the entire post, which concludes,

If we want to use coal to power our cars, there is a much more straightforward way: turn the coal into electricity - which we're already pretty good at - and use it to power plug-in hybrids. Because of the higher EROEI of using coal to create electricity, we could displace a far larger amount of imported oil this way at a comparable level of carbon emissions.

So: bad for the environment, bad for energy independence, and bad economically. The only thing coal-to-liquid technology is good for is channeling money to the coal industry. Which is why these bills are now racing forward.