The US Air Force Finds Oil in a Coal Field

Bituminous stealth bombers? Anthracite attack planes? Found this in the news this morining... Read on:

March 23, 2006: With oil at $60 a barrel, and likely to stay that high, it now becomes economically feasible to get fuel from other sources, like coal. So the U.S. Air Force, which currently consumes nearly 80 million barrels of oil a year, is trying to build a coal-to-oil plant that would supply about 14 percent of those needs. This plant would be in the United States, where there is plenty of coal available for conversion. The air force is trying to arrange the financing from private investors, using a fuel purchase contract from the air force as a lure. The air force consumes over half the fuel used by the Department of Defense.

-- Mike

sounds good to me, but what happens when the government burns up all of our coal reserves to fuel the bombers? No coal for me to heat my house. LOL!!

I know you're joking but that's really not possible...

U.S. coal reserves plentiful to meet growing energy needs

The United States is blessed with plentiful domestic resources, including coal, to generate electricity - and new technologies are allowing us to meet the growing demand for electricity more efficiently.

Over half of the electricity produced in the United States is generated by coal-based power plants. Coal is affordable. Supplies are plentiful. And, the United States possesses 275 billion tons of recoverable coal reserves, or about one-fourth of the world's total.

U.S. coal reserves are equivalent to four times the oil of Saudi Arabia, 1.3 times the oil of OPEC and equal to all the world's proved oil reserves.

The largest single increment of energy in the world is America's recoverable reserves of coal, secure within the borders of our country

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Its not like they are going to burn coal dust in the planes, they are just going to convert the coal to oil. Its been done for at least 50 years, coal carbonization... its just a matter of economics. Like oil from shale.

here's a link:

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htlog/articles/2 ... 60323.aspx

actually with the downgrading or elimination of suspected reserves in some other nations as well as the upgrading and increase in our coal reserves the us has almost 1/3 of the worlds coal. additionally we have 3/4 of the worlds oil shales which contain the rough equivilant of all the oil thats ever been produced in the world. coal liquification becomes economical at around $35/barrel and oil shale production at $50/barrel. oil shale is more costly to produce oil from mostly because of it's location where there is not large amounts of water that is needed for its processing. the only reason these things have not been developed more is because of the reluctance of private investors to invest unless they can be sure of high oil prices for years to come; they still remember getting burned in the seventies. I think that the US government getting involved will help things along this path because if these prices remain the United States will be able to afford to become energy independent.

btw, I think the admin was responding to the other poster's sarcastic reply to point out that we have more than plenty of coal.

Yep, when the oil price goes up, our options for alternative energies actually increase... albeit at correspondingly higher prices.

-- Mike

PS - Berlin, you're right... the reply was to Beaverman's post.