Coal to liquids

A new coal to liquids plant has recently been proposed - and as could be expected from the americans, it's very popular. The plant would produce around 100 million gallons (approaching 5 billion liters) of petrol a year.
The major reason is their unwillingness to rely on anyone else for their crude oil supply.

The proposed plant would have carbon capture and storage bolted onto it which, as far as the figures that I've seen suggest, means that the lifecycle emissions for the plant (including fuel carbon) would be comparable to that of an oil well.

This is a bad thing.

We know that unstopable global warming will take place if we continue with a business as normal approach. This is a business as normal approach, and we will not be able to reduce these emissions further - current technology is at full stretch here.

It's a typical american solution - when oil gets expensive they find more, rather than modify their behaviour.

Coal to liquids

I'm not a haulier.

This said I can't help but notice that they're coming into central london again today to protest against the rising price of fuel.

This is a democracy, I've no problem with this.

I would be concerned if the government gave in to them and gave them a rebate.

Not only is this meant to be a tax raising government (after all the credit crunch means that corportation tax receipts are down) - which means that I will have to pay for the rebate, but the high price of road fuels has done something to reduce the demand at the pump - this is only a good thing.
It also makes electric cars (which I see as the future) more economic.

So why am I talking about this?

I heard recently that the US navy are considering a coal to liquid plant to decrease their costs and increase their fuel security.
I'm told that the USAF have also recently trialed coal to liquid fuel in their (modified) aircraft.

The problem with this is that CO2 emissions associated with liquids from the coal to liquid process are almost twice that of normal hydrocarbons. Carbon capture and storage technoglogy can of course bring this down.

My argument is that the government should keep taxes as they are to push electric vehicles. These don't require road fuels with such high emissions.
As for the truckers? They say that the market is distorted since they are being undercut by cheap diesel from overseas firms. Fine - why doesn't the government charge £200 a week in road tax for all vehicles over 7.5 tonnes not registered in the UK? The Austrians and Swiss have a similar (although cheaper) system.