BLACK GOLD
Brian Schweitzer the Governor of Montana state in the United States is concerned about the growing fuel
prices across the globe, the reason the strong cartel of the OPEC nations who increase the oil prices at the drop of a hat. American's are addicted to imported oil and so the increase in oil prices have an over all impact on the entire economy of America. Brian feels that America and the entire world should switch to alternate sources of fuel.
Montana is a coal rich state which has about 120 billion tonnes of coal, which is more than a third of the reserves America has and is a quarter of the oil reserves the middle east has. In order to beat the rising oil prices U.S should produce
gasoline out of coal instead of oil.
The U.S had produced the same out of coal in 1928 and during the world war-2, 92% of Germany's aviation fuel and half of its total petroleum came from synthtic fuel or coal. South Africa has used the similar technology for the past 50 years and now produces 2lakh barrels per day of
synthetic gasoline and diesel.
The synfuel or synthetic fuel can be used in current engines without any technical modifications above all these fuels reduce greenhouse gases and toxins like sulphur, mercury and arsenic, besides these benefits these fuels produce biproducts like synthetic natural gas and hydrogen. The synfuels can also be used to generate electric power.
Inspite of several advantages the U.S didn't go ahead with setting up of large scale facilities to produce gasoline out of coal due to the huge costs involved in doing so and due to pressure from the oil industry desuading the government from continuing with further research on coal and alternate sources.
On the other hand countries like China, Malaysia and Qatar are building large synfuel facilities and Brazil has new generation cars that run on any combinations of ethanol and gasoline in a single tank. Its now high time that the people of U.S and the people across the globe wake up to the oil situation and develop new sources of energy that could neutralize the threats of the oil cartel in the coming years.
Manoj G.Varghese, Bangalore, India