There is no doubt that carbon-to-liquids facilities should be built immediately. The present economic crisis was created by all major nations ignoring and allowing the speculation in crude oil which drained the capital markets, nations and individuals of money. Such facilities could soon eliminate the demand for non-north american oil in the US.

A fraction of the monies spent to bolster world markets could be lent to coal companies to build faclities to use organic wastes as well as natural gas and coal. There should also be a guaranteed price for methanol produced.

The units should, however, produce methanol for long term storage pehaps in massive salt caverns. Methanol can be converted into gasoline or used directly if the US government mandated that a hundred dollars be spent to make all new cars methanol capable. Many race cars burned methanol for many years until ethanol became more politically correct. Methanol can also be converted into DME that can be used as the sole fuel in diesel engines, but it is like propane so it can be used for many propane uses as well. I have not heard of mixtures of propane and DME being used in diesel engines, but it might be a very good and cheap fuel.

Since the worst coal and even oilshale can be used in gassifiers, mine mouth plants can eliminate many transportation costs and use otherwise waste material. If such a plant can be located where oilfields can use the CO2 for better production that would be an advantage. In the future this CO2 may be recovered to make methanol from nuclear produced hydrogen. CO2 can also be recycled directly from the air if nuclear energy is cheap enough. Such a process will use mostly cheap nuclear heat. If the solar energy proponents wish to do the world a favor, they could implement units that use solar heat energy to recapture CO2 from the air. That is mechanical units that do not require lots of water like live plants do, and operate at higher efficiency than the one percent of live plants. ..HG..

methanol for long term storage pehaps in massive salt caverns.

The solubility of sodium chloride in methanol is about 14mg/g. So, the methanol would likely end up damaging the cavity and being contaminated with salt.

It makes no sense whatsoever to make carbon-to-liquids plants as long as we burn natural gas for electricity.  If we are gasifying carbon, we should use it to make electricity and use the natural gas as CNG fuel.  This skips the costly and inefficient Fischer-Tropsch synthesis step.

You can call this the Pickens-EP plan.

EP is right.

Currently dry biomass wastes in US (mostly waste from forestry and lumber industry) are co-combusted in coal-fired power plants to generate electricity. Saved NG is excellent fuel for fleet vehicles: buses, delivery vans, and alike. For many years city I live in has their vehicle fleet fueled by CNG. It is clean, cheap, and as additional bonus engines burning NG last twice longer between overhauls.

However, the main point of biofuels in US is to get reliable and inexpensive domestic liquid transportation fuel. Wet biomass and excess corn are good for this.

BTL and CTL will work, but more expensive and more polluting than CNG. Commercial vehicles frequently used can save on operating cost with a CNG conversion, saving liquid petroleum for private autos.

Biomass can be used to make electricity, saving NG for the commercial vehicle fleets. Why pay more and put up with more pollution and complexity and higher up-front investment?

Not only can we make electricity, we do make electricity with biomass.

This is a post about an analysis about BTL and CTL. And yes we can do lots of things. However, what most of us do is use petroleum to fuel our POVs. If we want to reduce petroleum to fuel our POVs, the most direct way is a direct fuel replacement.

The interesting thing is before electricity and POVs, we had city gas (producer gas , syn gas) for street and home lighting and horse.

I will award 1,000,000 carbon offset to the first genius that can explain dive a POV and use electricity.

What issue is unresolved?

Quoth the troll:

E-P’s ... conclusion is incorrect because of his documented ignorance of energy supply in the US.

The USA uses approximately 25 and a half quadrillion BTU of motor gasoline and distillate per year; about 72% of the distillate is used for diesel fuel, so the total used for ground transport fuel is about 24 quads.  The USA also uses about 23 trillion cubic feet (about 24 quads) of natural gas per year.  The electric-only sector uses about 6 quads of that, or almost exactly 25% of the energy of all the motor fuel.

Replacing 6 quads of natural gas with gasified biomass at 90% hot-gas efficiency requires 6.7 quads of biomass, or about 410 million dry tons @ 17.4 GJ/ton.  That same biomass turned into ethanol at 100 gallons/ton via a gasification process would yield 3.2 quads of motor fuel.  Using biomass to displace NG for use as CNG yields twice as much useful energy as BTL; if we could put our hands on a billion tons/year of biomass, we could displace enough NG to displace over 60% of motor fuel.

We import much more expensive oil than cheaper LNG.

On top of that, carbon isn't a fertilizer.  Processes which avoid destroying soil carbon (e.g. no-till) are at least as important as composting.

What is the name of this planet you live on E-P? Magic wand world!
E-P is proposing that the 99.7% of NG currently producing electricity be shifted to the 0.3% for currently used for NG transportation. So E-P do you think that there might be some infrastructure issues?
E-P has no clue to the amount of engineering that goes into a power plant. Assuming that permits are hand, engineering done, equipment purchased, let's build some generating stations. Biomass plants are limited to about 50 MWe at time and it takes longer to construct than CCGT that can be built 1000 MWe at time.
Currently, 15,754 MWe of NG is under construction and 868 MWe of non-wind renewable energy are under construction. E-P plan is like trying to empty a lake with a bucket in a rain storm. I saw E-P on the way home. He was hauling hay bails in economy car. I sure that E-P car got better millage, however, my pickup would be better suited for hauling hay bails.

I look forward to the day that we can build new wind, biomass, and nukes to reduce and turn back NG demand for electricity. Until that time, NG for transportation will not be a good choice.

“On top of that, carbon isn't a fertilizer.”
Organic fertilizer has a carbon/nitrogen ration of 10/1 compared to 20/1 for plants and animals.

Actually, Reality Czech if you want to make a distinction the correct word to be using in a thermodynamic sense is work. To transport a bale of hay over some distance would result in doing some unit of work. One way of doing this that does not rely on a magic wand, is using an ICE that develops a certain amount of power. Typically, the energy to produce the power comes from liquid transportation fuel.

When considering energy conversion systems, a distinction must be made for the kind of work being done, the equipment converting energy to work, and the source of the energy.

Purdue is built on bluff overlooking vast fields of biomass. I was a student at Purdue on October 17, 1973, when OPEC imposed the oil embargo against the West and first used oil as a political weapon. Concurrently, there was a shortage of NG and propane to dry grain, so corn was rotting on the ground. The energy to produce fertilizer and diesel for tractors was going to waste.

Now the Purdue engineering and ag students are looking down the bluff to see if the is an opportunity to produce transportation fuel. Their conclusion is that there is a large opportunity to produce transportation fuel but first they develop a better model and LCA to determine if it is a sustainable model.

Natural gas is very good fuel (better as a feedstock for plastics and ammonia) for stationary applications. NG is not a good transportation fuel. If you went to school in a California cesspool where you burn lots of NG to make electricity burning biomass to make electricity may be a better option for air quality reasons.

If that does not answer your question Reality Czech, ask again but try to be more specific.

@BTL is one of the lossiest options

EP, biomass is a lossy option no matter how you use it. For example, it will take 100 to 1000 times more biomass btu's to bring a cup of water to boil than with a clean NG stove. It is simply very inconvenient to use - collection, transport, handling - all of this is difficult, hard to automatize. That's why it is not used when cheap fossils are available.
But that's the challenge! The fact that it is lying around rotting, nobody needs it! However, with a little bit of imagination you can devise some simple but clever schemes to convert it into a water-clear highly flammable liquid with a nice kerosene like odor that can be sold to everybody!
As a chemist, I find these types of things rather fascinating!

The only thing left begging is Reality Czech’s logic. There is an elephant in the room that E-P and Reality Czech chose to ignore.

“LCG, October 16, 2008--The ceremonial groundbreaking occurred yesterday for the Gulf LNG Clean Energy project located southeast of Pascagoula on the Pascagoula Bayou Casotte Ship Channel. When completed, the liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal will enable 150 tankers per year to deliver natural gas from Africa. The project is scheduled for completion in late 2011 and is estimated to cost $1.1 billion.”
http://www.energyonline.com/Industry/News.aspx?NewsID=7293&Groundbreaking_for_New_LNG_Terminal_in_Mississippi

Shifting one imported transportation fuel to another imported transportation fuel results in no net improvement.

For many years we had a huge surplus of cheap NG and many programs promoted NG as a transportation fuel with the following result:

6,874 - electricity generation
0,026 - NGV

My point in presenting the number this way is to illustrate the choices for using NG. While my personal choice would be to use NG as transportation fuel and use biomass and nukes for electricity, that is not the reality of the last 10 years. It does not matter how well engineered you product is if American consumers will not accept it. So E-P and Reality Czech how do you like your NGV?

Now for more reality:

15,754 – new NG electricity generation
00,868 – new non-wind renewable energy electricity generation

Hopefully, new non-wind renewable energy electricity generation will have a high capacity factor while new NG electricity generation a low capacity factor. However, to be specific, Reality Czech seems to think non-mandated NG power plants are being built to collect dust and LNG terminals $1.1 billion to lose money.

@Roger

Earth first! We can drill the other planets later. Drilling for oil and NG in the US is a very good way to reduce imports.