Continuing to mine is a foolish idea
Ron Erickson, Missoula

The Missoulian argues for an increase in coal mining in Montana with the idea that the coal should be converted to various synthetic fuels ("Thar's diesel in that thar coal," Missoulian, July 31).

That's not a new idea - the Judge administration looked at the same thing in the late '70s, and I remember a visit to a coal gasification pilot plant in Scotland in 1976 where Rosebud seam coal was being tested as feedstock. But it's a silly idea if you are interested at all in the fate of the planet. The most significant planetary threat we face is the climate change occurring as we increase the amount of carbon dioxide being spewed into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels.

The reason there is a clear preference among fossil fuels (natural gas is better than petroleum, which is in turn better than coal) isn't just because of the toxicity of byproducts of their combustion, though that is a significant concern. Burning any of these fuels produces carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas causing climate change, but the basic chemical composition of each fuel (the ratio of hydrogen to carbon) assures us that the amount of carbon dioxide produced per unit of energy received is far less for the hydrogen-rich fuels like natural gas. It is the fuel of choice among a bad set of choices.

But producing synthetic fuels from coal is even worse than what I just suggested in the previous paragraph. The problem lies in a sentence in the Missoulian editorial. "In simple terms, it involves the heating (not burning) coal to produce so called syngas, which is converted to hydrocarbons and then refined into a form of diesel or other fuels." The key word there is heating. It takes energy to get that heat - all of the synfuel processes I studied back in the '70s burned coal, often to produce steam, to make the process work. That is, producing synthetic fuels whose fate is to be burned inevitably produces more carbon dioxide per unit of useful energy than any other way of obtaining that energy.

So any increase in the use of coal increases global warming, and using coal to produce new fuel compounds the problem. It would be foolish public policy to create more global warming by this or any other means.