Guest post by David Archibald
Ira Glickstein’s post promoting clean coal has prompted me to offer a few slides from a presentation I had prepared. One of the things that gets me about clean coal is that the same people who are urging restraint are quite happy to halve the life of our coal reserves.
My thesis is that the rising oil price will drive inter-fuel substitution to the highest value markets, which are those transport applications that require a high-density liquid fuel with good storage characteristics – essentially diesel and jet fuel. Coal will be substituted for oil into the transport fuels market. That in turn will make it too valuable to burn for power generation, in which nuclear will substitute for coal. I am a thorium nut as well as a coal-to-liquids (CTL) proponent. The nuclear industry has financed a lot of the AGW hysteria, as they saw this as the only way they could sell nuclear plants against coal. They needn’t have bothered. At the current oil price and above, coal is diesel that is waiting to go through a CTL plant. At US$120 per barrel, it becomes worthwhile to close existing coal-fired power generation and replace it with nuclear, taking the hit on the capital charge of the idled coal plant.
Some people call for US energy independence but have no practical idea of how that could be achieved. Others, strangely, rail against the concept. So, here follows a plan for US energy independence by 2020. The technology exists and it is costed and affordable.
Poptech says:
January 3, 2011 at 5:50 am
Poptech says:
January 3, 2011 at 5:50 am
phlogiston
ROFLMAO! How is France “energy independent” when it imports 96% of it’s petroleum, 99% of it’s Natural Gas, 100% of it’s Coal?
You think the UK’s energy policy is based on a free market? So there are no energy taxes, subsidies, regulations, incentives or mandates in the UK on energy? Seriously?
A very versatile posterior, one minute you’re rolling on it, the next you’re talking out of it.
I was indeed referring to electrical energy. But your central point was energy policy should be “left to the markets” with no big brother government interference. The history of power generation policy in the UK and France are a counter-example to this argument. France intervened on behalf of nuclear and it has paid off. The UK only recently started intervening (aside from subsidies are regulation that affects everything from birdfeed to pig farming) but in the wrong direction – wind and waves, which (as has been abundantly argued on this site) is illusory power since it is intermittent and needs to be accompanied by corresponding fossil fuel capacity.
Government has a role to play in electricity generation and there are consequences to getting it right or wrong.