DARPA=Pork
DARPA's new coal-to-liquids solicitation, which was brought to my attention by the excellent Wired blog about defense technology called Danger Room, might be a good idea. But from a global warming perspective, it is disastrous.
The $4.5 million solicitation calls for a research project that would devise a method to turn coal into jet fuel. As Danger Room points out, it would help the United States lose some of its addiction to petroleum. But then the solicitation mentions "environmentally friendly". They talk about utilizing the hydrogen from coal. WRONG.
Coal isn't a hydrocarbon. It is almost completely carbon. In fact, it's one of nature's most effective methods of fixing carbon from the atmosphere and burying it deep underground, thereby keeping it from playing havoc with our climate. The only way to get hydrogen from coal is to turn the rock into methane (a process which pulls four hydrogen atoms from the atmosphere and attaches them to each carbon atom), and then turn that methane into a liquid fuel. In the end, you release the same amount of carbon into the atmosphere as you would if you were burning the coal in a campfire pit. To attach all those hydrogen atoms, however, you need to add a lot of energy, water and equipment capital cost. Altogether, you end up releasing at least twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as you would by drilling and burning the equivalent amount of crude oil.
If you want to keep coal as a part of our energy pie while avoiding global warming, there is only one way to do it: carbon sequestration. That means turn the coal into methane or syngas, burn the methane and then capture the carbon part of the exhaust and bury that underground. I am a VERY firm supporter of research and project finance in that arena. But anyone who talks about a simple coal-to-liquids process without the extremely expensive step of burying the carbon is proposing a greenhouse gas nightmare.
This isn't just bad science. According to the Washington Post's Intel Dump column, it goes counter to last year's energy bill, which prohibits the federal government from purchasing fuel which has a higher greenhouse gas weighting than plain-old petroleum. In other words, if DARPA's project works economically, the Department of Defense will still be prohibited by law from buying the stuff. Huh?
I used to view DARPA with the same geeky reverence I had for the Apollo program and Star Trek. Now that I've had professional contact with the organization, I know that it has become simply another government pork program. The main reason anybody gets a grant from DARPA is either because there was political pressure from the system placed on the institution or because the grantee played a lot of golf with the grant administrator. I'm sure a few of the granted programs are worthwhile and will someday bear fruit. But for the most part, it's my opinion that a cancer has attached itself to DARPA. And it's terminal.
The $4.5 million solicitation calls for a research project that would devise a method to turn coal into jet fuel. As Danger Room points out, it would help the United States lose some of its addiction to petroleum. But then the solicitation mentions "environmentally friendly". They talk about utilizing the hydrogen from coal. WRONG.
Coal isn't a hydrocarbon. It is almost completely carbon. In fact, it's one of nature's most effective methods of fixing carbon from the atmosphere and burying it deep underground, thereby keeping it from playing havoc with our climate. The only way to get hydrogen from coal is to turn the rock into methane (a process which pulls four hydrogen atoms from the atmosphere and attaches them to each carbon atom), and then turn that methane into a liquid fuel. In the end, you release the same amount of carbon into the atmosphere as you would if you were burning the coal in a campfire pit. To attach all those hydrogen atoms, however, you need to add a lot of energy, water and equipment capital cost. Altogether, you end up releasing at least twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as you would by drilling and burning the equivalent amount of crude oil.
If you want to keep coal as a part of our energy pie while avoiding global warming, there is only one way to do it: carbon sequestration. That means turn the coal into methane or syngas, burn the methane and then capture the carbon part of the exhaust and bury that underground. I am a VERY firm supporter of research and project finance in that arena. But anyone who talks about a simple coal-to-liquids process without the extremely expensive step of burying the carbon is proposing a greenhouse gas nightmare.
This isn't just bad science. According to the Washington Post's Intel Dump column, it goes counter to last year's energy bill, which prohibits the federal government from purchasing fuel which has a higher greenhouse gas weighting than plain-old petroleum. In other words, if DARPA's project works economically, the Department of Defense will still be prohibited by law from buying the stuff. Huh?
I used to view DARPA with the same geeky reverence I had for the Apollo program and Star Trek. Now that I've had professional contact with the organization, I know that it has become simply another government pork program. The main reason anybody gets a grant from DARPA is either because there was political pressure from the system placed on the institution or because the grantee played a lot of golf with the grant administrator. I'm sure a few of the granted programs are worthwhile and will someday bear fruit. But for the most part, it's my opinion that a cancer has attached itself to DARPA. And it's terminal.
posted by Sam Jaffe at
8:37 AM
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