Who’s “we” and “all of us”? Your average worker driving up to a gas station to fill up her car isn’t spending billions defending Saudi Arabia,* and probably doesn’t hold very strong opinions about the Middle East. All she cares about is getting the best price for a gasoline of adequate quality. Given the choice at the pump between regular gasoline at $1 per litre or synthetic gasoline at $2 per litre, she is going to pick the regular gasoline every time.
Even if you take the view that a portion of her tax dollars are funding the defence of Saudi Arabia, the amount is negligible compared to what she probably spends on gasoline in a year.
But not very useable data, as I understand it. The subjects were in such poor condition, starved, overworked, beaten, etc. that their ‘endurance’ isn’t very relevant to that of a typical pilot or soldier. Even a fat, out-of-shape tourist on a sinking cruise ship has more endurance than a concentration camp inmate.
The Secunda CTL plant in South Africa produces 160,000 barrels/day of synthetic crude from coal, which is a significant fraction of the national consumption of 553,000 barrels/day.
To be fair, the Secunda plant was subsidized by the apartheid government because of the oil embargo, so it might have been otherwise uneconomical; but it doesn’t seem to be “too expensive to be practical”.
They still do, and now that much of the investments are paid off, the plant is a money machine. The same type of synthesis is used with natural gas as a raw material and is also sufficiently economically promising that several companies are considering investing in such plants. The technology can also be used for biofuel production, but right now it’s not economically viable with biomass raw materials.
The product is about the highest quality diesel fuel you can get, extremely low in aromatics and completely sulfur-free and may become even more interesting as stronger regulations on SO2 emissions seem to emerge some places in the world.
Yeah, but the economy of the plant would suffer dramatically. A CtL plant is one of the many examples of economy of scale and that sometimes, bigger is in fact better.
The “300 years worth of coal” figure, as far as I can tell, is based on using that coal in the same way as today, which is to say mostly for electricity. If one were to instead use enough of it to replace a significant fraction of the motor fuels that are currently derived from crude oil, it wouldn’t last as long.
Isn’t the M60 machine gun based on a WW2 German design? Distaste doesn’t seem to come into the equation.
New Zealand used to have anatural gas - petrolplant back in the 1980s but it was taken offline in the 1990s as the oil price dropped. It’s very much a solved problem.
No we don’t. A better estimate is 220-250 years at current consumption and assuming that we leverage lignite deposits as well. At any reasonable growth rate and being conservative, it’s more like 125-175, without any new consumption from CTL tech.
Not only that, but I’ve personally worked with the CTL folks in South Africa, and there are many plans to expand production, to the point where folks are very worried about South Africa becoming a net coal importer within an alarmingly short time frame.
