Would this be his boy, Werner?
Posted on 06/12/2008 12:39:21 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
FRANKFORT — Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Southgate, said a coal-to-diesel facility under consideration for construction near Paducah could “change the whole picture of energy in the United States.”
Bunning, during a conference call Tuesday with Kentucky reporters, said he’d known about tentative plans for such a plant “for a long time and I’ve kept my mouth shut.” The Paducah Sun’s Bill Bartleman recently reported that a consortium of five major companies is looking at constructing a $3.5 billion facility near Paducah, which could convert coal to diesel fuel.
Bunning said if the facility clears permitting hurdles, he will push federal legislation to provide incentives such as accelerated depreciation to help it get going.
“Large sums of money are available if in fact a private sector company comes to the federal government with a plan,” Bunning said. He has supported federal subsidies and incentives for coal-to-liquid conversion and he sees it as part of an overall plan for U.S. energy independence and a boon to Kentucky’s coal industry. Bunning would not identify any of the companies involved but said he’d met with their representatives.
“All I can tell you is they’ve been in my office telling me what they need, and I told them to go get ’em,” Bunning said. He said the plan calls for capturing up to 94 percent of the carbon emissions at the plant, which he called “unbelievable.”
Bunning said the U.S. must develop more of its own fuels by drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and off the continental shelf. He said proposals for windfall profits taxes on oil company profits “just don’t make any sense” and will ultimately drive up the cost of gasoline at the pump.
“Get it through your head that if we put a so-called windfall profits tax on oil, we will have less oil and less gasoline and therefore the price will go up and not down,” Bunning said. He said there is “zero” chance such a bill will pass the current Congress because Republicans in the Senate can muster 41 votes for filibustering such a measure.
He said right now OPEC nations set the price of oil because they control 92 percent of the world’s oil supply. But he thinks prices at the pump will eventually come back down, perhaps to the $2.50 range, although it will “take a long time until we get our domestic production back up to speed.” Many analysts say higher gas prices are likely to be permanent.
Bunning said he’s concerned about the economy, a rise in the unemployment rate and failure of investment banking firms. “The economy over the next three to five months is going to be bad,” he said.
But he thinks presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain of Arizona won’t be tied to the unpopular policies of George W. Bush.
McCain’s likely Democratic opponent, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, often says McCain is running for a third Bush term and calls for the end of Bush tax cuts to wealthy tax payers. McCain once opposed those cuts but now supports them.
“The worst thing you can do in a bad economy is to raise taxes,” Bunning said. “And that is what Barack Obama is planning to do.”
“sounds promising”
I’m sure the democrats will find a way to stop it.
Good, work, Kentucky!!! Now, build about 50 more of those plants.
Big mistake announcing it. Now, all the science flunkouts (with degrees in “education”) will start protesting the plant.
Love it!
The Gorebots are probably storming the nearest court house for an injunction as we read.
You realize the ‘Manhattan Project’ was conducted WITHOUT Congressional approval.
I’d tell the companies to get busy NOW.
I need 30quadtrillion (with 15 zeros) of BTU’s NOW!
(Recently a $50M grant was given to University of Dayton to work on coal -Southern Ohio High Sulfur Coal that is, to liquid fuels for Wright Patterson AFB. I’m just waiting for the Environmental Defense Fund to show up. I’m just waiting for them to try to back up their commitment of NOT one drop of fossil fuel from the soil of the US.)
Shale to oil could be unbelievable- places like Montana and Colorado etc...the damn REGULATIONS are keeping us from getting to it...
The problem has alway been in making it economically attractive. Perhaps if we have a government guaranteed subsidy ...
Or in other words, this smells like another version of ethanol.
If these involve Fed permits the Environazis will sue citing the polar bear is threatened status. You can thank Dubya for that.
It’ll get killed. The environwhackos will shut it down simply because the word “coal” is in it, even if the process is totally clean.
Read this and I think you will agree the oil industry has already been Nationalized in the US;
It was common in those days, as it is in ours, to identify the Communists as leftist and the Nazis as rightists, as if they stood on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. But Mises knew differently. They both sported the same ideological pedigree of socialism. “The German and Russian systems of socialism have in common the fact that the government has full control of the means of production. It decides what shall be produced and how. It allots to each individual a share of consumer’s goods for his consumption.”
The difference between the systems, wrote Mises, is that the German pattern “maintains private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary prices, wages, and markets.” But in fact the government directs production decisions, curbs entrepreneurship and the labor market, and determines wages and interest rates by central authority. “Market exchange,” says Mises, “is only a sham.”
Mises’s account is confirmed by a remarkable book that appeared in 1939, published by Vanguard Press in New York City (and unfortunately out of print today). It is The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism by Guenter Reimann, then a 35-year old German writer. Through contacts with German business owners, Reimann documented how the “monster machine” of the Nazis crushed the autonomy of the private sector through onerous regulations, harsh inspections, and the threat of confiscatory fines for petty offenses.
“Industrialists were visited by state auditors who had strict orders to examine the balance sheets and all bookkeeping entries of the company or individual businessman for the preceding two, three or more years until some error or false entry was found,” explains Reimann. “The slightest formal mistake was punished with tremendous penalties. A fine of millions of marks was imposed for a single bookkeeping error.”
Reimann quotes from a businessman’s letter: “You have no idea how far state control goes and how much power the Nazi representatives have over our work. The worst of it is that they are so ignorant. These Nazi radicals think of nothing except ‘distributing the wealth.’ Some businessmen have even started studying Marxist theories, so that they will have a better understanding of the present economic system.
“While state representatives are busily engaged in investigating and interfering, our agents and salesmen are handicapped because they never know whether or not a sale at a higher price will mean denunciation as a ‘profiteer’ or ‘saboteur,’ followed by a prison sentence. You cannot imagine how taxation has increased. Yet everyone is afraid to complain. Everywhere there is a growing undercurrent of bitterness. Everyone has his doubts about the system, unless he is very young, very stupid, or is bound to it by the privileges he enjoys.
“There are terrible times coming. If only I had succeeded in smuggling out $10,000 or even $5,000, I would leave Germany with my family. Business friends of mine are convinced that it will be the turn of the ‘white Jews’ (which means us, Aryan businessmen) after the Jews have been expropriated. The difference between this and the Russian system is much less than you think, despite the fact that we are still independent businessmen.”
As Mises says, “independent” only in a decorous sense. Under fascism, explains this businessman, the capitalist “must be servile to the representatives of the state” and “must not insist on rights, and must not behave as if his private property rights were still sacred.” It’s the businessman, characteristically independent, who is “most likely to get into trouble with the Gestapo for having grumbled incautiously.”
“Of all businessmen, the small shopkeeper is the one most under control and most at the mercy of the party,” recounts Reimann. “The party man, whose good will he must have, does not live in faraway Berlin; he lives right next door or right around the corner. This local Hitler gets a report every day on what is discussed in Herr Schultz’s bakery and Herr Schmidt’s butcher shop. He would regard these men as ‘enemies of the state’ if they complained too much. That would mean, at the very least, the cutting of their quota of scarce and hence highly desirable goods, and it might mean the loss of their business licenses. Small shopkeepers and artisans are not to grumble.”
“Officials, trained only to obey orders, have neither the desire, the equipment, nor the vision to modify rules to suit individual situations,” Reimann explains. “The state bureaucrats, therefore, apply these laws rigidly and mechanically, without regard for the vital interests of essential parts of the national economy. Their only incentive to modify the letter of the law is in bribes from businessmen, who for their part use bribery as their only means of obtaining relief from a rigidity which they find crippling.”
Says another businessman: “Each business move has become very complicated and is full of legal traps which the average businessman cannot determine because there are so many new decrees. All of us in business are constantly in fear of being penalized for the violation of some decree or law.”
Business owners, explains another entrepreneur, cannot exist without a “collaborator,” i.e., a “lawyer” with good contacts in the Nazi bureaucracy, one who “knows exactly how far you can circumvent the law.” Nazi officials, explains Reimann, “obtain money for themselves by merely taking it from capitalists who have funds available with which to purchase influence and protection,” paying for their protection “as did the helpless peasants of feudal days.”
“It has gotten to the point where I cannot talk even in my own factory,” laments a factory owner. “Accidentally, one of the workers overheard me grumbling about some new bureaucratic regulation and he immediately denounced me to the party and the Labor Front office.”
Reports another factory owner: “The greater part of the week I don’t see my factory at all. All this time I spend in visiting dozens of government commissions and offices in order to get raw materials I need. Then there are various tax problems to settle and I must have continual conferences and negotiations with the Price Commission. It sometimes seems as if I do nothing but that, and everywhere I go there are more leaders, party secretaries, and commissars to see.”
In this totalitarian paradigm, a businessman, declares a Nazi decree, “practices his functions primarily as a representative of the State, only secondarily for his own sake.” Complain, warns a Nazi directive, and “we shall take away the freedom still left you.”
In 1933, six years before Reimann’s book, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish academic in Dresden, made the following entry in his diary on February 21: “It is a disgrace that gets worse with every day that passes. And there’s not a sound from anyone. Everyone’s keeping his head down.”
It is impossible to escape the parallels between Guenter Reimann’s account of doing business under the Nazis and the “compassionate,” “responsible,” and regulated “capitalism” of today’s U.S. economy today. At least the German government was frank enough to give the right name to its system of economic control.
Here is the link for this article:
I G Farben had a whole refinery complex devoted to extracting hydrocarbons for energy. The processes are scientifically well documented.
The technology is proven and relies on an abundant domestic resource. Utilizing the raw material does not decrease the food supply.
I guess I should have read down the thread before I made reference to the Nazi effort.
Not to mention South Africa supported itself for years with liquid fuel from coal. I believe this was the same process.
Once the army of left wing lawyers decend on Kentucky, it will be like a carcass of maggots. They will have the coal workers suing the mining companies for invented hazards, and trumpted up liability cases for make believe injury lawsuits. Then the eco-Marxists will come in with the kill blow. These litigational entrepreneurs know where the money is.
You’re right about the regulations being the problem. It’s certainly not the technology as the Germans fought most of WWII using diesel made from coal.
Once the army of left wing lawyers descend on Kentucky, it will be like a carcass of maggots. They will have the coal workers suing the mining companies for invented hazards, and trumpted up liability cases for make believe injury lawsuits. Then the eco-Marxists will come in with the kill blow. These litigational entrepreneurs know where the money is.
Once the army of left wing lawyers descend on Kentucky, it will be like a carcass of maggots. They will have the coal workers suing the mining companies for invented hazards, and trumped up liability cases for make believe injury lawsuits. Then the eco-Marxists will come in with the kill blow. These litigational entrepreneurs know where the money is.
Nazi Germany fought World War II with coal to fuel conversion 69 years ago.
The democrats and their evil trial lawyers have fought this and all other sources of energy. They will derail it.
He’s got most of it right but he’s blown it by calling for subsidies. Improving the tax structure is fine, but throwing public money at a private company will guarantee inefficiency.
Two things can make it viable without subsidies: Sustained high oil prices and/or nukes as the heat source for the conversion process.
This is probably the way out. It won’t be cheap, and it won’t be quick. About 25 years of serious building of coal plants might keep this going. Oddly, it could have been done and paid for already. There have been 30 years at $5 billion a year with nothing built. We could be laughing at Saudi et al.
This is coal to liquid not shale. Big difference in that coal to liquid is feasible on a meaningful scale.
Congress had $10 billion for coal to liquid in 1948. Project was killed by cheap oil, and even cheaper imported oil.
Sounds expensive. Sounds like another excuse for not using more domestic petroleum and not building up new domestic refining capacity. Also sounds like another way to keep oil over $100 per barrel.
BTW, of course it works. Worked fine for Hitler. You have enough money you can make AVGAS out of spruce roots, as the Japs did in WWII. Be better to make Methanol out of coal. It's fairly simple, and Methanol is a heck of a lot better fuel than Ethanol, not to mention, much MUCH cheaper.
Lot of Southern Ohio coal miners out of work. But God forbid they should drive to Columbus and compete with illegal aliens.
What's "unbelievable" is that otherwise rational human beings will buy the BS that carbon is a pollutant.
But, as they say, there's one born every minute. ...and they vote DemocRAT.
Carbon sequestration will be the roadblock...just as it was in Ohio a year or so ago.
Good points. Most people aren't aware of the tremendous cost advantages of using nuclear power plants as a source of process heat. A nuclear plant built near to a coal-to-oil plant would use what is usually considered “waste” heat as process heat. In effect, this would double the efficiency of the nuclear plant.
That shouldn’t be a problem Every clear headed American knows where the tree huggers can shove the carbon.
Neither does producing ethanol from corn. That is just as big a bogus notion as "global warming".
That pine root oil thing made a few barrels, but it would not prove useful. The stuff would choke a jeep.
We're dealing with politicians, bureaucrats and envirowackos...clear headedness doesn't even enter into it.
Yep FT process, invented in the 1920’s...
With todays technology, it is really surprising that North America is not solely powered by coal oil...
Switch grass is being grown in Oklahoma. The Noble Foundation has proven that it is the best source for ethanol....more drouth resistant, grows on marginal soil. This can replace corn and then food prices can go down.
Except it produces cellulose not sugar. The cellulose has to be broken down into simple sugars before fermentation which makes it expensive.
Now compressing switch grass to fuel pellets to be used instead of fuel oil in the northeast is cheap and would replace a significant ammount of petroleum.
Terrific post we get a 2fer, electricity + use of secondary heat to provide energy for producing deisel....
As liquid fuel is easier to move than coal (and it would weigh less once converted), I’m thinking that conversion plants should be springing up in all of the major coal production areas.
Not quite.
Given the high capital and operating costs involved, it is unlikely someone would shell out the billion plus involvement without some substantial downside guarantees (i.e. subsidies). Recall that only a few months ago, oil was going in the range of $20 or so a bbl, which reflects the breakeven cost in the event sanity returns to the market. Nobody could operate a CG plant at those rates -- or probably even $100/bbl at best.
Nuclear power is still safer than the front seat of Ted Kennedy's car, but try to obtain a permit to construct a simple steam generation power plant -- and then consider the time delays and even more exorbitant capital costs involved in building a failsafe facility. Again, you will need guarantees before undertaking such a venture.
I still stand behind my earlier contention that CG is another white elephant like ethanol.
“Sounds promising.”
The Democrats will kill it. I guarantee it.
Would this be his boy, Werner?
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