Carter doesn't botch the coal-to-liquids program

With the Synthetic Fuels Act, the Carter administration offered subsidies to firms making liquid fuel from coal, in order to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil.

Unfortunately, the bill only specified that coal be turned to liquid not that it had to be turned into internal-combustion engine fuels (since the 1973 oil crisis, well over half of all US oil consumption has been for transport).

This meant that millions of taxpayers' dollars were squandered paying coal companies to turn coal into dirty slurry (useless for internal combustion engines) before burning it.

What if he'd done it right?
 
If this whole project is done correctly, the U.S will have alot cheaper fuel prices for just about everything related to hydro-carbon fuel usage. Gasoline, diesel, heating fuel, petro-chemical by products will all come down in price.

With the Awesome coal reserves and deposites in U.S, this seems like a natural move.

Also, the political and military involvement in Mid-East should sharply decline. Perhaps the U.S will export some of its fuel.

With Carter being Carter this is very far fetched. Fuel strategies and Carter just had bad luck. There were gas shortage lines, Three mile Island(nuclear power halt), not building any more refineries, all under Carter's watch.
 
Kind of an environmental catastrophe. Except for burning piles of old computers to get at the base metals, there's not much that's worse for the environment on a macro-level than ersatz oil.
 
Didnt the Germans manage to do this during the war? or was it so hopelessly efficient that its not worth it in the civillian market?
 
The effort was too small scale and too close to the end of the war to help the Germans.

In a 1970s economic model, it's not inefficient. You can charge pretty cheap for it, even given initial start-up costs. If it's nationalized we're probably talking $10-30 a barrel. If it's just subsidized, probably $50-100.

In a world where the cost of releasing carbon is factored into the equation (say a world with a carbon-trading market set up) it becomes insupportable.
 
Didnt the Germans manage to do this during the war? or was it so hopelessly efficient that its not worth it in the civillian market?


It was a classic engineering foul-up: going to production scale while essential supporting R&D was still ongoing. The full-scale technology just wasn't there yet.

That said, had there been created a NASA analogue for energy, a major thrust of which had been coal to synthetic ready-to-use liquid fuels, most of the problems likely would have been solved by now. I don't think for an instant it would have been quick: the environmental issues alone would be tremendous. But by now I believe these problems would have been solved, and bituminous coal coming out of PA, WV, KY, TN, IL, and other places would be going into the marketplace as synthetic gasoline or diesel fuel.

And that's what should be happening today: a NASA analogue dedicated to developing economical non-petroleum energy sources, including coal to liquid fuels. It would be a boon to engineering in the form of a scientific/technical renaissance in the US that would rival the Manhattan Project or the Apollo project.
 
Didn't the South Africans try it? I though that was FUBAR too? Certainly must have been expensive.


Yes, they had to try this with all the embargos placed against them in the apartheid years. Foreign oil was hard to get.
South Africa is a leader in Coal to gasoline technologies, holding many patents. There is a conversion complex in South Africa that is very impressive in this type of fuel production. Something around 160,000 barrels a day of fuel produced,
 
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South Africa uses the the process to produce a large portion of their gasoline and diesel fuels they built the plants in the late 70s when no one wanted to sell them oil. Fluor Engineers & Constructors designed and built the plants. The costs are not competitive with light Saudi Crude at $10 a barrel but at $100 per barrel it's very competitive. What made Carters energy initiative a boondoggle was that it paid for research and development of new coal liquefaction technologies, not the construction of plants using existing technology licensed from the Germans.

If you want to see the plant search for sasolburg on Google Earth the plant is south and east of the town.
 
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^ There is two plants in SA that produce synthetic oil, one at Sasolburg and the other at Secunda not far from the border with Zimbabwe.

Carter's idea was a good one. The problem with such technologies in the pollution involved, which is substantial. But in the former coal belt, such technologies then and now would be useful for energy supplies and employment.
 
Could you elaborate?

I admit to some hyperbole here. The negative effects of the ersatz process are qualitatively different from burning plastic. I was just using it as a sort of analogy for really really stupid behavior ("throwing money on the fire"; "burning plastic." maybe it doesn't work as a maxim.)

In my honest opinion, the ersatz process enacted in the 1970s, would be significantly worse for the environment than that.

Right now, IOTL, the fragilest of political coalitions is forming in the US between national security hawks, environmentalists, energy and extraction industry corporate interests, and labor (especially miners' unions and farmers.) This coalition has just started examining energy issues, noting that it would be a good idea for us to develop alternatives to petroleum for the various reasons held dear by each specific faction (job security, money, saving the planet, oil is owned by "terrorists", what have you.)

If in the 1970s you develop an economic model whereby a profit can be made from ersatz oil (and let's add in ethanol, since any change in energy policy is going to have to go through the farm belt) you've derailed that coalition preemptively. Organized labor and farmers are as happy with the way things are as the corporate interests are, and the Hawks couldn't care less about fossil fuels so long as they're not in the pockets of the Saudis anymore.

Meanwhile you're pumping much more carbon into the atmosphere than IOTL and environmentalism has even less political support. It's popular support probably remains steady, perhaps even rises a few percentage points nationally, but not enough to get any significant legislation passed.

So while it's possible that as 1940LaSalle suggested that science might have caught up and cleaned up the process in the intervening decades, it's doubtful, because the public will to call for its clean-up probably wouldn't be there.

If, ITTL, people begin to think environmentally in the '00s in significant enough numbers to call for change, as they did IOTL, it's probably too late. In 2008 we're probably looking at the equivalent of OTL unchecked 2030-2050 carbon levels with legislation stuck back in the 1990s.

That's what I mean by catastrophe ;)
 
With the Synthetic Fuels Act, the Carter administration offered subsidies to firms making liquid fuel from coal, in order to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil.

Unfortunately, the bill only specified that coal be turned to liquid not that it had to be turned into internal-combustion engine fuels (since the 1973 oil crisis, well over half of all US oil consumption has been for transport).

This meant that millions of taxpayers' dollars were squandered paying coal companies to turn coal into dirty slurry (useless for internal combustion engines) before burning it.

What if he'd done it right?

Probably, it gets shut down in the 1980s as a waste of money when oil becomes cheap again. If it survives, it gets shut down by in the 1990s as a waste of money and a huge source of greenhouse emissions.
 
Interesting, but:
In 2008 we're probably looking at the equivalent of OTL unchecked 2030-2050 carbon levels with legislation stuck back in the 1990s.

That's what I mean by catastrophe ;)
This bit doesn't make sense to me... what are you saying? :confused:

Or are you still talking about the ATL 2008? In that case it does make sense.
 
Interesting, but:

This bit doesn't make sense to me... what are you saying? :confused:

Or are you still talking about the ATL 2008? In that case it does make sense.

Yep, sorry, it is poorly phrased. In the ATL 2008, they'll have emissions significantly higher than the 2008 levels of OTL. If OTL emissions go unchecked, we'll be reaching ATL 2008 emission levels in the next few decades.

Politically-speaking, the ATL will probably be about a decade behind us. The Ozone scare will keep environmentalism alive, but politically it won't be as popular if American economic well-being is tied even more to fossil fuels.
 
Probably, it gets shut down in the 1980s as a waste of money when oil becomes cheap again. If it survives, it gets shut down by in the 1990s as a waste of money and a huge source of greenhouse emissions.

Hold on a second. The energy used to make such fuels does not necessarily have to come from fossil fuel burning. It could rather easily be done by building nuclear power stations (Carter's program was before TMI) and using the electricity generated by them to fuel the coal-to-oil plants.
 
Hold on a second. The energy used to make such fuels does not necessarily have to come from fossil fuel burning. It could rather easily be done by building nuclear power stations (Carter's program was before TMI) and using the electricity generated by them to fuel the coal-to-oil plants.

As I remember the process (caveat: it's been 30+ years and I was on the engineering side and not the chem side) it was a closed container chemical reaction stripping the carbon from the coal and bonding it with hydrogen stripped from steam. It is an endothermic process and uses large amounts of water. The coal that is burned is used to heat the steam and the reaction retorts and with modern stack scrubbers could be relatively cleanly or the heat couldcome from electricity however generated.The real polution issue with the process is the residue. Any sulfur, metals or minerals in the coal need to be stored, disposed of or a use found for them.

The problem with Carters plan was that it paid for research into new technology, not perfecting existing technology invented else where. Companies were discouraged from looking into the German process because it was not covered by the research subsidy.
 
Hold on a second. The energy used to make such fuels does not necessarily have to come from fossil fuel burning. It could rather easily be done by building nuclear power stations (Carter's program was before TMI) and using the electricity generated by them to fuel the coal-to-oil plants.

This would still have the effect of disbanding OTL's renewable energy coalition in Congress and I'm honestly not sure how using nuclear affects the cost of the project.

On another front, this could definitely be the Republican party's road to even more dominance from the 80s into the 90s. If you can get miners voting the same way as their owners, you've taken West Virginia for the presidency every time (though the Democrats probably still control every other office of the state; they're just vocally anti-environment.) The rest of Central Appalachia is wrapped up without question (Kentucky/Tennessee) and you've potentially thrown Pennsylvania and Illinois up in the air. Certainly any Congressional district with even a bit of coal mining in it takes the first opportunity to become Republican. The Unions are the only thing keeping most of those districts from flipping anyway, as they're mostly culturally conservative as it is. If you remove the Union objection, I that changes a lot of electoral maps.

Or the Democratic Party becomes more anti-environment. I think the former is likely, though perhaps a split is in order.
 
Hold on a second. The energy used to make such fuels does not necessarily have to come from fossil fuel burning. It could rather easily be done by building nuclear power stations (Carter's program was before TMI) and using the electricity generated by them to fuel the coal-to-oil plants.

Well, I can't find the date of the program you seem to be referencing, but between whatever date that was (Jan 20, 1977 at earliest) and March 28, 1979, how many of these nuclear-powered conversion plants could have been built?
 
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