On Mar 18, 5:11*am, "Eisboch" wrote:
On-topic, since the price and availability of fuel affects boating.

I've been reading about alternative energy sources lately, including solar,
wind, geothermal, etc. *All have levels of promise but none will come close
to satisfying energy needs in the short or long term.

Meanwhile, the US has the world's largest supply of coal in various forms.
Coal can be processed into oil. *It's called "synthetic oil" because it's
not liquid in it's natural state but when processed, it is virtually
indistinguishable from high grade oil.

Estimates vary, but it is believed that there is at least an 80 year supply
of oil obtainable from coal if it supplied all of our energy needs at
current rates. *It would last much longer when supplemented by conventional
oil reserves, solar and wind energy.

The process to convert coal to oil becomes economically justified when
regular oil prices exceed $35 per barrel.
China is busy building several coal to oil conversion plants.

Why isn't this technology and resource being tapped into in the US?

Eisboch


Primary issues as I see them.

The plants are expensive to build, might as well build nuke plant and
hydrolysis plants to change sea water to hydrogen & oxygen for fuel
cell use whose byproduct is fresh water which we are short of.

Still hydrocarbon fuel with the standard greenhouse gas as well as
other NOx, sufuric acid, nitric acid....products of combustion.

The process of converting the coal to oil is also very energy
intensive. Hitler ran his war machine one coal derived oil because it
was all he had access to, not because it was inexpensive or efficient.

The process leaves large quantities of nasty & toxic waste, including
radioactive waste (most all coal is low grade radioactive)

Coal mining itself is a dirty process with large amounts of
environmentally damaging waste and requires large slurry lakes. These
require damms which have collapsed in the past causing major
tragedies. We barely keep this under control at current levels of
production. Now lets say we increase it ten fold....

The best direction we have to go now is hydrogen which can only be
efficiently and economically produced using nuclear energy. It will
produce the minimum amount of waste which can be reprocessed and
disposed of on site by drilling holes to 30,000' (we do this right now
for deep oil and gas) stacking 10,000' of waste into it, cap with
1000' of leaded concrete and back fill with dirt.