GTL and CTL have always been about energy security. If you want FT with low carbon footprint, you need to use either waste or biomass as a feedstock. Both significantly increase product cost, though.

The bottom line is that reducing annual mileage is still the single most effective way to address both energy security and GHG emissions. The problem is that such reductions are hard to achieve, especially in the short term. Even where high-quality public transportation is available, car owners tend to eschew it, citing travel times and convenience. Another factor is that cars are expensive and depreciate with calendar days even if they are not driven much.

@Rafael - welcome back!

a question - which is better - convert cars to run on CNG or convert the gas to gasoline and use that?

It is becoming more and more evident that implementation of a wider energy mix would benefit USA but cannot be left entirely to the market and/or free enterprise to do it.

A closer look at what is happening to the financial businesses confirms the above. Enron was another example. There are many others.

Energy (from all sources) being an extremely important development and economic tool cannot be left in the hands of speculators looking for quick profits regardless of the national interests. USA cannot continue to import 15 million/barrel of oil + NG + Electricity + Ethanol etc every day.

Why not create a small national Energy Board (EB) to develop and implement a national energy plan to solve the oncoming energy crisis. Many knowledgeable Americans would offer their contribution to ensure that the EB decisions are in the best interests of the nation.

Waiting will lead to another crisis similar to the current banking crisis.

How many other major crisis can USA tolerate in support of free for all enterprises, lobbies, politicians and speculators.

Its never as simple as this. First off there is a point where too little fuel results in war.. alot of war and thus a very big mess. Also the tech of ctl and gtl is changing as they research better ways and cheaper ways to do it.. thus changing the point at wich ctl and gtl might actauly be less damaging to the world then say ultra deep oil extraction or heavy or super heavy oil refining.

I suspect the most likely outcome is one hell of a war and one hell of a co2 spike from burning cities and use of realy dirty fuels.

Unfortunately, public transport does not compete with automobiles on raw cost (parking not included.) A $4 gallon of gas gets a 10mp/day commuter around three commute days. That same commute by bus (in 80% NA cities) averages $4/day. That does not include cost of inconvenience, time, access, etc. to public transit. Making public transit ALOT cheaper is imperative to its growth.

While pilot tests of free public transit have their own set of problems (e.g. requiring greater security) it is a proposal in need of consideration.

More seriously,

Welcomeback Rafael, everybody missed you here

this an interesting study indeed, but the result is hardly surprising just a confirmation that what a simple rule of thumb was telling us, without care CTL will double the CO2 emission per mile, unless vehicle like Aptera or Chevy Volts are used. So CTL should only be developped if average CAFE standard is at least doubled so 50 MPG. CCS would pobably make CTL uneconomical and make the energy efficiency even worse, better grow Algea with the CO2 then use the Algae as fertiliser to store the Carbon. The study points out that it is unclear if coal reserve in US are that big to sustain a massive CTL development, clearly a massive development of CTL will send the pice of COAL to the roof. If you look at the number the quantity of coal extracted in US keeps going up but the energy content extracted every year has already peaked a few years ago because of the decreasing quality of coal we extract these days. The reserve of coal in US are vastly overestimated if you consider traditionnal extraction technology. They are probably bigger if you consider in-situ combustion.

Anyway very scenario based on fossil energy is just a transitionary scenario. CTL in my view should be used with extreme moderation to reduce our exposure to oil but better invest in PHEV, EV, biofuel, Alternatve vehicle, electric public transportation, geothermal, wind, solar, nuclear than this durty CTL.

@gr
"public transport does not compete with automobiles on raw cost"
That's right it doesn't, but only if "commute by bus" is the public transit in question. Up until the 1930s every city in N. America worthy of the title had a streetcar system to move people, buses were an idea sold to cities to destroy public transit. Read-
http://28thamendment.wordpress.com/2008/08/06/death-of-a-transit-system/
LRT[if done smart] is far more cost effective than the car and has additional advantages like increasing tax revenue through Transit-Oriented Development. We KNOW this to be true because city after city that has tried it has seen it happen.
http://www.lightrailnow.org/

Of course LRT isn't the last word in public transit[in fact it's one of the first]. PRT is an idea that looks very good (on paper) and only needs one city with courage to try it.

The answer is quite simple, and the researchers have not the intellectual honesty to present it. Generate all electricity with nuclear and use the coal to make FT fuels. In addition, use plug-in-hybrid cars that also use nuclear electricity for some of their travel.

There is no scientific fact presentation that concerns green house gas emissions that is complete without the presentation of the fact that the adoption of nuclear reactors to replace even the most efficient of fuel powered electrical generation is the cheapest way to reduce CO2 emissions whilst maintaining current levels of energy consumption.

Every organism that lives or ever lived, ingested naturally radio-active potassium its entire life. There will never be any live creature that is not exposed to the natural radio-activity internal and external to the body. In short, there will never be any nuclear Jungfraus. Humans and other live organsisms survive well at several times the natural radiation that they now get on the average. Soil radio-activity was much higher two thousand million years ago. Rare individuals meet their demise from this natural exposure, but far more do so with man or nature caused exposure to organisms.

Life cannot be made free of risk. All risks must be statistically and economically balanced. Most people do not know that the three remaining reactors at Chernobyl were kept in operation for many years. It would be statistically far more conducive to continued existence to live in the abandoned town near that reactor than in any part of Zimbabwe or Haiti.

At the present high prices of uranium that are twenty times what they were ten years ago, it is now economical to extract the remaining uranium from used fuel rods to be used again. Many used fuel rods contain more U235 fuel than natural uranium does. Each pound of plutonium extracted from used fuel rods eliminates the need to mine 200 pounds of natural uranium. There are known and tested methods to get nearly 300 times more energy out of a pound of uranium or thorium which is three times more abundant.

There are also large stockpiles of uranium with about half the U235 that is in natural uranium. The current high prices and the now more efficient methods of extracting U235 make these stockpiles very valuable.

Used fuel rods are not all waste. They are at least 96% reusable. At the low efficiency of 20 percent, the actual products of fission per kilowatt-hour weigh about 0.001 grams. Every person in the US has an average consumption of 20 KWH a day. The use of nuclear electricity over a hundred years would produce 166 grams which is less than the weight of 34 nickels of fission products per person. It is less than the weight of a cup of water.

If all 300,000,000 people in the US got their electricity from nuclear power plants, less than 3000 pounds of fission products would be produced every day. At this rate, the estimated surplus weapons uranium thought to exist in Russia, 600 tons, would power the entire US for one to two years. Since less than 20 percent of US electricity comes from nuclear. The Russian uranium could fuel all US reactors for five to ten years without any new uranium being mined. Three thousand pounds of fission products could fit into a two drawer file cabinet.

Fission products are a one to one match with the amount of U235 fissioned except that in some reactors, plutonium produced internally from U238 can almost double the efficiency. At $0.01 per kilowatt hour, the plutonium in spent fuel rods could be converted to at least $10,000 a pound and nearly double with the mentioned additional plutonium prodution during the reactions. Surplus weapons plutonium is worth double this in energy.

The estimated 20 tons of surplus plutonium could supply all of the US electricity for less than a month. At only 20 percent this is about five months. One of the reactors near Phoenix can and would take twenty years to burn it if mixed with used fuel that had only the fission products removed.

A CANDU reactor could be started with 100 tons of thorium combined with 2 tons of surplus weapons plutonium or uranium. Less than a two tons of thorium could be added each year and the fission products extracted on site. No new plutonium or uranium would have to be added ever.

France is now producing nearly 80 percent of its electricity with nuclear reactors. Writers in the US falsely state that no new reactors have been built since about 1980. Some US reactors were finished after 1980 and many reactors were ordered and built outside of the US.

France is now in the position that, even with sales into the neighboring countries, it has excess nuclear power at times. Power can be sent from France all the way to Norway and Sweden. Holland is getting a lot of power from Norway over the new undersea cable. Some German coal fired power plants could be shut down and all the excess power sold into to Germany if there were adequate transmission lines. But it would be economical to electrolyse water to get hydrogen with any electrical capacity not being used. The CO2 from wine fermentation can be fed with hydrogen to organisms to make ethanol. Just over the border, the Germans on the Rhine could make Eau des Wasserstoffs from their CO2. Just adding hydrogen to some fermentations might reduce or eliminate the CO2.

It can be assumed, that with all expenses paid or amortised, that nuclear electricity costs $0.05 for a kilowatt hour. The efficiency of water electrolysis can always be made higher than %50. A gallon of gasoline has less than 36 kilowatt hours of combustion energy in it, so the amount of expensive electrolysis hydrogen that equals the combustion energy content of a gallon of gasoline would cost 2*36*5 = $3.60. An electric car can go 360 miles on this electricity. A car with an engine can go a maximum of 50 miles on this hydrogen, but it still might be less expensive than gasoline. Excess electricity from any kind of power plant can be bought regularly for less than $0.02 a KWH.

At $100 a tonne, the coal cost of hydrogen at %50 efficiency is $2.40 for gallon of gasoline equivalent. Coal at a big mine only costs about $5 per tonne to produce.

Eventually liquid fuels will be produced directly from hydrogen produced by nuclear heat and recycled CO2.

The current expense of imported oil cannot be sustained in the US. The worries about global warming are of low concern to the people of the US compared to digestion and avoiding damage from environmental forces such as lack of heat. ..HG..

Welcome back, Rafael.

GTL and CTL are most valuable for future air transportation, which requires the fuel that has the highest energy density, as well as sport and luxury cars which must have high performance.

For reduced GHG emission, biowastes or algae oil can be used instead of coal or NG.

Trucks and economy cars can run more economically on methane, both NG and biomethane now, and H2 later.

@Fat Knowledge

I have read several CM LCA and they are worth the effort to find. CM emails me at work a link with a password for some of their research at no cost. However, I would not subscribe unless it was directly work related. Reading LCA can be rather tedious but when it comes to reducing environmental impact, the devil is in the details.

@gr
That reminds me, your earlier post comparing the cost of car and bus transit only looked at the fuel cost. Both have other costs so it is only when you look at the total that you can say for sure which is cheaper.

Take the car; Let's say the price of gas is $4, but that's only the price you[as a driver] pay at the pump. Back when gas was only $1 they did a study and found out you[as a taxpayer] was actually paying $4 extra because the oil companies get favourable treatment; lower taxes, grants etc. and you have to pay for that with higher taxes on other stuff- http://www.icta.org/doc/Real%20Price%20of%20Gasoline.pdf

You[as a property owner] are also paying for the infrastructure the car needs. Sure, you[as a driver] must sometimes pay for parking but it is you[as a property owner] that pays for the land the parking spot was built on, and the street in front of your property too. And of course cars don't just travel inside a city so you[as a taxpayer] pay for the highways (gas taxes aren't near high enough to cover those).

However even though you[as a driver] have the help of all of us[even those of us who don't drive] paying for all that you[as a car owner] still have to pay the other costs of owning a car; insurance, maintenance, etc.

One last thing; the convenience of a car is relative. Back when I went to school it was more convenient to ride transit because it gave me extra time to study or sleep during the trip. It was time far more productively spent than the commute I now do by car.

@ai_vin
The CM LCA is an example of we can influence public policy based on making informed decisions based on accepting the choices people make.
The reason people and own and drive cars is freedom. Your link to the ICTA junk science report reminds me why I want to avoid living in a big city where liberals think they can figure out simple life choices better than their citizens.
“The growth of low-density suburbs has increased the amount of time commuters spend traveling to and from work (see chart, page 24) and sitting in traffic.”

While there is no chart on page 24, there is a table on page 27 that indicates the increased time is less than one minute. I also learned from the table on page 20 that CO2 causes cancer.

My point is not to nit-pick but to point out that your source is not very credible.

“It was time far more productively spent than the commute I now do by car.”

So why does ai_vin not use public transportation?

I work the graveyard shift in an area not serviced by a bus route because the city has short changed its transit system to cut costs. However that could change now that the our mayor is feeling the heat. I did take the bus to work every night during my first 10 years on the job and still use the transit system during the day for shopping and rec time on my days off.