Can coal make us self-sufficient?
The United States is blessed with an abundance of coal, which is cheap to mine and burn. While coal can be turned into electricity with far less air pollution than in the past, the process produces higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions than natural gas or nuclear power, raising concerns about the human contribution to climate change. New research is finding ways to capture and store coal-burning emissions, but, on a large scale, the technology will almost certainly be expensive. Coal can also be turned into a liquid fuel for transportation using technology that has been around for nearly a century and was used extensively both by the Germans during World War II and by the South Africans during the apartheid-inspired embargo. The process works. Sasol, a large company headquartered in Johannesburg, is making synthetic fuels from coal, but again, prices are not competitive with open-market oil and natural gas. America’s nascent coal-to-liquid industry needs subsidies or loan gua
