There's no such thing as a coal-fired B-52. Or is there? It seems there is.
The US Air Force has been looking at synthetic fuel for years. I found a paper written by Dr Carlo Kopp, a well-known civilian defense analyst and author. His paper, The US Air Force Synthetic Fuels Program, was published by Air Power Australia, an air defense think tank he founded. The paper was last updated in 2008. It's very interesting reading. I will also point out that the author, Dr. Kopp, is not some cheezy internet blogger pulling nonsense out of his butt. He's a senior member of both the IEEE and the AIAA, and a working computer scientist and EWAR researcher.
He states:
In the US, the Defense Department launched its Assured Fuels Initiative (AFI) in 2001, with the aim of developing domestic sources of clean fuels, using coal and natural gas. This is an ambitious effort intended to break dependency on imported crude oil products. The US Air Force alone burns around 3 billion gallons of aviation kerosene annually, more than half the consumption of the whole US military machine.
Michael A. Aimone, the US Air Force assistant deputy chief of staff for logistics, recently commented 'Our goal is by 2025 to have 70 percent of our aviation fuel coming from coal-based sources'. This is an aggressive but clearly very achievable planning goal.
Conventional oil reserves with essentially be gone very soon—within decades. This is no secret except to those who don't want to think about it. For the Peak Oil doomsday theorists, this is the end of the trail for industrial civilization. Well, not so fast. Not quite.
You can't power a jet fighter or a tractor with coal. (Actually, you could a tractor but it would be ugly.) But there are many mature technologies for converting coal, oil shale, and natural gas to liquid fuels just as good as gasoline or diesel. Canada and China are both doing it today. China is investing heavily in this effort.
Kopp gives a good summary of the available technologies. He also makes several striking statements. Here's one:
In terms of coal reserves, the US is well positioned as it is ranked first globally with 26 percent, followed by Russia with 23 percent, China with 12 percent, and Australia with 8 percent. No less importantly, the US has large reserves of oil shale in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado, forming the Green River formation, which is estimated to contain around 1.5 trillion barrels of oil, cited as 'more than five times the stated reserves of Saudi Arabia'.
Natural gas as a potential feedstock for synthetic fuels is no less abundant, with Russia ranked first, the US ranked sixth, and Canada nineteenth.
Great news, huh? We're out of the woods. The sky isn't falling!
Not so fast, there, Chicken Little. You've got that nonsense in your head about "500 years of coal reserves," don't you? That "500 years" is probably less than 50 when you start plugging in what might happen to demand. And we're going to have to strip-mine a lot of the country to get at it. Synthetic fuel production processes are dirty. Coal mining is dirty. Environmental concerns? Forget those. They're gone. We can't afford them. We've got a greedy world to fight off, mouths to feed, and a landscape to rape. You tree-huggers better shut up if you know what's good for you.
If oil consumption goes up just 7 percent per year, that means it doubles in 10 years. And we know that globally, it's going up a lot faster than 7 percent.
Coal fuels most of the power grid in the eastern US, and coal and natural gas together fuel almost all of US electricity production. Nuclear and renewable sources contribute tiny fractions to the total. That's not likely to change. Right now demand is essentially flat. But consider what happens to demand for coal and gas when we start wholesale conversion to synthetic liquid fuels.
Let's be conservative and say that as we start a wholesale shift to synthetic fuels, demand for coal increases 10 percent per year for awhile. That's not much, right? That's a believable number. Well, that means we have to double our coal production every 7 years.
Put another way, we will have to mine more coal in the next 7 years than we have so far in our entire history. That's what "doubling time" means.
If demand for coal rises 30 percent per year, for even a few years, that means coal production has to double every 70/50 = 2.3 years!
Here's a last tidbit to consider. Those nice Canadians have all that oil up there. Right now it looks like a lot, and they're happy to sell it to us. The party is going fine so far. We buy more oil from Canada than from anyone else. (Think about that Keystone pipeline again.) But the US is a greedy energy pig, and one day soon the Canadians may realize that their oil reserves aren't really that big at all. What happens then?
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