EU Energy Policy Blog

Unconventional fuels, that is gas or oil from coal, shale and tar sands are a bit helpful for security of supply but about the worst thing going for the environement.

How much energy do we get for every pound of carbon we send into the atmosphere? Fossil fuels are hydrocarbons, meaning they consist of atoms of hydrogen and carbon. The hydrogen burns to make water (H2O), while the carbon burns to make carbon dioxide (CO2). Natural gas contains the most hydrogen—four atoms per atom of carbon—and coal contains the least. So gas provides the cleanest energy—that is, it emits the least carbon per unit of energy. Coal emits the most, and oil is in between.

But there is another reason why fossil fuels vary in how much carbon dioxide they emit. Some fuels take a lot of energy to produce—for example, the energy that heats shale underground. Since this energy comes from fossil fuel, it releases carbon dioxide without contributing energy to the final fuel. The worst fuel in this regard is liquid coal. Producing and using liquid coal emits 1.8 times as much carbon dioxide as producing and using gasoline made from oil.

Fossil fuels vary in quality, and so-called synthetic fuels (or unconventional fuels) vary in the energy required to make them. But they can be ranked roughly as follows:

From a climate perspective, making gasoline from synfuels is about like burning coal in your car’s engine.

And let’s not forget the global rebound effect. As I explained in my last post, world oil demand rises when an increase in the supply of synfuels reduces the price of oil.[...] The combination of global rebound effect and synfuel’s high CO2 emissions per unit energy makes any synfuel program detrimental from a climate perspective.

As far as energy security is concerned, remember that producing liquid fuel domestically does nothing to protect American consumers from oil price shocks (see chapter 9 of Carbonomics)). When a terrorist group or the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) raises the world price of oil by cutting off some supply, the synfuel companies—the big oil companies—will do just what they do with domestically produced oil today. They will raise the price to match the world price of oil. Consumers are not protected. [...]

Synfuel can claim only one benefit. It will, as I just noted, lower the world price of oil somewhat. This is a benefit to the oil consumers of the world, and it also takes some revenues away from OPEC.[...]

Steve Stoft

These are excerpts from chapter 11 of my forthcoming book Carbonomics.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 22nd, 2006 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Carbonomics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.