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Comment by jacoblyles | Hacker News Reader

Econtalk had an episode about carbon shortage recently. It turns out that synthetic fuels manufactured from coal become economical far before petroleum is totally gone. And there are other more expensive technologies that come into play when the coal is gone.

All the while, renewable energy is getting cheaper by the year.

Here's the link. It is a fascinating podcast, though it wanders a bit near the end:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/08/laughlin_on_the.htm...

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With Thorium reactors you can generate so much electricity you can convert CO2 into hydrocarbons directly. If for whatever dumb reason thorium reactors don't happen, yeah Fischer-Tropsche Coal to Oil is the way to go. Al Gore will be upset though at all your non-carbon neutrality, for what it's worth but they'll sure as all heck do it in China. Problem is is that building an industrial scale Fischer-Tropsch plant is a big undertaking, on the scale of building a major oil refinery and you'd have NIMBYs up the wazoo anywhere you tried to build that in the U.S.

"become economical far before petroleum is totally gone"

What does that even mean, though? If oil was gone today, dragging things by hand or with horses would become economical, too. That doesn't imply that it would afford us the same luxurious lifestyle we enjoy today (luxury == not having to drag stuff around by hand, among other things).

Sasol, the world's largest coal-to-liquids (CTL) and gas-to-liquids (GTL) producer, has stated that GTL becomes financially viable at $10-$20 a barrel while CTL reaches the same level at $50-$60 a barrel. So with the current price of oil at over $70, it's reasonable to assume that CTL, supplemented by GTL, could maintain prices at close to current levels.

I must admit I don't understand what this means? So Sasol could provide a replacement for oil that only costs 10-20$ per barrel? Why isn't everybody using their stuff now, instead of the 70$ "real" oil?

Also, in my mind "peak oil" was actually just "peak fossile fuels" - how much more coal and gas is there than oil?

There's lots and lots of coal in all sorts of places. Wikipedia should give you the details.

"So Sasol could provide a replacement for oil that only costs 10-20$ per barrel?"

With sufficient natural gas feed stocks, yes.

As to why it's not being used now, until the very recent fracking revolution the supply of gas had been pretty tight, at least at where it's needed for consumption. See e.g. Russia's regular fights with the Ukraine.

Probably the only places where it might make sense to build GTL plants are in relatively unstable oil producing nations that are currently flaring off their gas instead of doing anything else.

There's also the issue of your confidence in predicting the future. These are expensive plants, and if e.g. a world-wide recession eventually leads to a crash in demand then you may not be able to service your debt on what you're able to sell your product at (there are plenty of people who suspect oil might crash to $10 a barrel, e.g. what if the PRC's demand sharply drops?).

It just means that it's profitable for them as a company to make it at that price, but their volumes are still relatively tiny compared to the overall fuel market. Presumably were we all to switch to gas-to-liquids to increased demand on liquid natural gas supplies would push the price up quite significantly. So it's not likely that we could replace oil with a $20 a barrel substitute, but it's plausible that coal-to-liquids and gas-to-liquids could serve as relatively affordable substitutes even on massive scales.

And I'm not sure how much gas there is, but there's enough coal to last for 50-140 years, depending on demand.

And don't forget that at ~$200 / barrel oil from tar sands becomes viable. The oil will be flowing for some time yet.

ideally there should be a solar-wind-powered atmospheric CO2/H20 to hydrocarbon synthesis device in every backyard, and i believe that's how our grand(grandgrand)children will operate. it'll take a while to get there, though.

Looking back at some of the things our grand parents expected us to have now, I would have to say predicting a lean green future seems a little foolish.

the slight difference is that both oil and coal will eventually run out and there will have to be a way to replace them - or make them.

Yes, but that does not mean it will be cleaner than, or even as clean as what we have now.

You mean trees? The fit your description perfectly, except for the wind-powered part.

almost, except trees take too long to grow and cars don't run very well on wood. i mean something that gets CO2 and H20 and yields gas, lpg, diesel or something else that can be put into your tank without making a trip to a refinery first.

see e.g. http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/08/12/bug.diesel/in... for the basic idea.

What's so magical about a small scale?

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