anaesthetica's Journal: Back in Black: the Return of Coal

The coal in the ground in Illinois alone has more energy than all the oil in Saudi Arabia.

The New York Times reports that coal has returned to the fore of efforts to wean the world from oil dependency. There are huge coal reserves that dwarf known oil reserves, and transforming oil into fuels for cars, homes, and factories uses proven technologies. Despite the higher carbon-emissions of coal, it is currently far cheaper than natural gas. From the article:

Most of the interest is in making diesel using a technology known as Fischer-Tropsch, for the German chemists who demonstrated it in the 1920's... The gasoline market is more than twice as large, but if companies like Rentech sated the demand for diesel, the process could be adapted to make gasoline. The technology was used during World War II in Germany and then during the 1980's by South Africa when the world shunned the apartheid regime there.