Can Alternative Fuels Fill the Gap?
Michael Webber, the Associate Director of the Center for International Energy & Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, focused on CTL for his presentation. Although CTL fuels have excellent performance characteristics and have been approved by the US Air Force as an alternative liquid domestic fuel, their carbon footprint is much higher than that of other fuels, and the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 essentially blocks their use by setting emissions limits. CTL also requires high energy and water inputs, leading to the running joke that the cost of CTL is always the price of oil plus $10/barrel. CTL probably isn’t feasible without government subsidies, he says, and carbon capture and sequestration technology (CCS) only really works—if at all—when attached to power plants, not to millions of tailpipes. Pamela Tomski’s of EnTech Strategies also addressed the future of CCS. Her outlook was cautiously optimistic, pointing out that global growth in coal con
