naturalsol

Rentech: Homegrown Synthetic Fuel On the Near Horizon

The main hitches are:

1) Heat comes from natural gas, which is subject to considerable price variation. If RTK would use solar PV and electic arc or something to produce heat, it would be more attractive.
2) Coal is used for electricity generation. The Fischer-Tropsch CTL process is about 70% efficient. One barrel of oil requires about 192kg of coal to to be produced usin CTL. This means we need a daily 4.4 billion kg increase to current coal output in order to meet 23 million bbl/day completely from coal. This is a very large increase in daily coal output, and challenging to meet.

Of course, a combined GTL, CTL, Wind, Solar, Biogas, Algae fuel will better address the petroleum crisis, and we probably will not rely solely on CTL.

But! CTL is expensive b/c 1) we need coal for power plants, 2) mining operations would need to be significantly increased to meet a new demand, 3) mining is polluting

But RTK is probably a good buy at this price...looking down the road.

nice article.