 | DrumBeat: April 13, 2008 | The Oil Drum | Gail Tverberg's Talk: Expected Economic Impact of an Energy Downturn |  |
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Well at least it's better than corn ethanol.
In that it doesn't cause people to starve ?
Of course - it depends if climate change eventually results in sufficiently large damage to crop going areas - in that case, CTL may prove to be just as bad as corn ethanol...
Yes, but CTL is still better than corn ethanol because the latter can't replace a majority of global oil even when pushed to the maximum, and doing that will certainly result in a major die-off in the global population. While not even solving the oil conundrum to a reasonable degree, thus exposing societies to chaos [just a bit of pleasing the doomer audience here] which can lead to even greater die-off.
There is also a reasonable chance that atmospheric CO2 capture becomes a viable technology; such a technology would be useful for future generations to save themselves from GhG disaster. On the corn ethanol side, what technologies do we have to mitigate famine? How do we bring people who have died from lack of food back to life?
Of course, CTL plants are expensive and take a long time to build, so this brings up the important question if a major push towards plug-in hybrids and electric mass transit would be a more useful allocation of our scarce time and resources.
I believe the answer is yes, even if the coal is used to power the plug-in hybrids and electric mass transit. Higher efficiency and fuel flexibility (in the broader sense of the word, eg including wind and solar 'fuel') are key advantages over a CTL based strategy. Also, the emissions from coal-electric transport might be sequestered completely, which isn't possible with CTL as the vehicle part will still have significant emissions even if the processing (CTL) part uses 100% sequestration. Of course, the above mentioned atmospheric CO2 capture might fix that.
The remaining liquid fuel portion (the non-plugin part of hybrids, boats, airplaines) could be supplied by CTL, but I think that, overall, advanced biofuels, or even completely synthetic fuels (derived from wind etc), would be a better choice for this purpose.