Yikes!!! Obama said he was AGAINST Liquid Coal during the campaign.

[Karmadillo]

Seeing how he ran away to the right from his positions on single payer and offshore drilling, will he demonstrate a similar rightward lurch on his old favorite, Liquid Coal?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/09/AR2007010901503.html

Who, but who, would soil the environmental reputation of Barack Obama?

The Democratic senator from Illinois gets stellar marks from greens. Just a few months ago he was calling global warming "real," saying: "It is here. . . . We couldn't just keep burning fossil fuels and contribute to the changing atmosphere without consequence."

So why then, environmentalists ask, is Obama backing a law supporting the expanded use of coal, whose emissions are cooking the globe? It seems the answer is twofold: his interest in energy independence -- and his interest in downstate Illinois, where the senator's green tinge makes the coal industry queasy.

The coal industry praises Obama's reintroduction, with Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.), of the Coal-to-Liquid Fuel Promotion Act of 2007 last week, which would provide incentives for research and plant construction. The industry says the technology, which converts coal into diesel engine fuel, would reduce America's dependence on foreign oil through a new, home-mined fuel that burns as cleanly as gasoline.

Environmentalists say focusing on coal does nothing to arrest climate change. Instead, they say, lawmakers should back cleaner alternative fuels and stricter automobile and industrial emissions standards.

more...

[Karmadillo]

1. Obama walks away from liquid coal

http://climateprogress.org/2007/06/13/obama-walks-away-from-liquid-coal/

The one blemish on Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) environmental stance had been his support for coal-to-liquid (CTL). Now he has clarified his position:

Senator Obama will not support the development of any coal-to-liquid fuels unless they emit at least 20% less life-cycle carbon than conventional fuels.

Yet, even if you capture all the carbon dioxide from the process, pure coal-to-liquids have 4% higher lifecycle carbon emissions than conventional fuels, as previously noted. The only way to get a 20% reduction in emissions is by blending in a lot of biomass (see page 25 here).

Yet in practice, that blending would add tremendous cost and complexity to a system that already costs a stunning $4.5 billion dollars just for a 50,000-barrel-a-day facility without CO2 storage and without biomass blending. And we would need more than 200 such facilities to replace all imported oil today. Not gonna happen.