Anybody see 60 minutes?

Talkin about all the coal in Eastern Montana and how they want to refine it to a deisel like substance for a clean burn...cleaner than current deisel. They have massive amounts of it there. Interesting peice.

I didn't see the show but they announced a similar project here in Pennsylvania a few years back.

http://www.fossil.energy.gov/news/techl ... erton.html

At Gilberton, Waste Management and Processors Inc. PTY., LLC will head a team to build and operate a power plant that will produce clean electricity, high-value industrial heat, and nearly 5,000 barrels per day of clean-burning diesel fuel from raw anthracite wastes. At the core of the advanced process will be a coal gasification process that will turn the wastes into a chemically-rich source of gas. A portion of the gas will be converted into diesel while the rest will be combusted to make electricity and steam. Planned for a 75-acre site adjacent to the existing Gilberton Power plant, the $612 million project is the largest of the eight projects selected. The Energy Department's share is proposed at $100 million.

There are many of these waste piles, some have been around for a hundred years. They have been slowly removing some of them where the coal content was sufficient for co-gen plants. It works out nice because they remove the piles and get a return on it. The waste ash is then used to fill the strip mines in.

It's a win-win-win situation. They get energy from what is essentially waste, and the landscape gets returned to a more natural state with the removal of the piles and the filling of the voids...

Actually coal to fuel is not anything new, they have had that or similar technology for years. If my memory serves me correct the Germans actually did that during WW2 or attempted to, I forget which. Guess it never caught on in the commercial sector because the return wasn't enough to justify the expense.

Yes, they mentioned the Germans and how they used it in WWII. The process invloves the gases, not the actual coal. Looked like the guy from Montana thought this could be one of the keys to weaning ourselves away from foreign oil...along with ethanol. We have a huge plant near where I live in South Bend Indiana and that plant produces E85...85% ethanol and 15% petrol. Lets see where all this American ingenuity leads us!

One very promising setup is to farm algae in shallow, racetrack-shaped ponds for continuous biodiesel production. This can be coupled with a coal-fired power plant - the CO from the power plant is fed to the algae to promote growth and clean the air.
Algae produce far more gallons of oil per acre than any land-based crop, and nobody can accuse the farmers of taking food out of anybody's mouth in order to produce fuel.
Biodiesel makes much more sense when considering energy put in to energy extracted than ethanol does. Still, even if ethanol isn't the best form of biofuel, it's better than foreign oil.