This post is by Mark Brownstein, managing director of business partnerships and specialist on coal technology at Environmental Defense Fund.
On Monday, CONSOL Energy – one of America’s leading coal companies – announced they would build America’s first coal-to-liquid plant in West Virginia. The press release from coal country announces that a strategy for sequestering carbon dioxide pollution produced by liquefying coal will be part of the project. That’s important because an EPA study found that diesel fuel from coal could result in double the greenhouse gas emissions of diesel fuel from oil.
Many Americans are feeling real economic distress with gasoline above four dollars a gallon. Economic hardship and energy security play to coal’s strength as a traditionally low cost, domestic, and plentiful energy resource. Deploying the technology to convert it to gasoline and diesel fuel seems like a no-brainer. But it’s not so simple.
This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.
This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.
This post is by Miriam Horn, a writer at Environmental Defense Fund and co-author of the New York Times bestseller,