Air Force Considers Montana CTL Plant

MONTANA, Apr 07 (Neo Natura) - Although the Air Force program is currently purchasing gas-to-liquids synfuel purchased overseas, they are pushing for a CTL facility to be built in Montana. While coal is plentiful in the American West, natural gas is far too precious in the North American market to be used as the input for F-T conversion. McClatchy's Air Force leads push to liquefied coal fuel (March 30, 2008) tells the story—

With every $10 rise in the price of a barrel of oil costing the Air Force $600 million, the service is converting its entire 6,000-plane fleet to run on a synthetic fuel mixture. Tentative plans call for construction of a coal-to-liquid fuel plant at a Montana air base.

Air Force officials have been testing synthetic fuels based on coal or natural gas. They plan to certify the fleet of nearly 6,000 aircraft to fly on a 50-50 blend of synthetic fuel and traditional petroleum-based jet fuel by 2011.

Assistant Air Force Secretary Bill Anderson said the search for affordable, cleaner-burning alternative fuels was driven by economic and national-security concerns.

Let's state the obvious up front—the Air Force is surely "peak oil aware." Branches of the military and the intelligence services do scenarios planning. "The United States would be all but powerless to protect the American economy in the face of a catastrophic disruption of oil markets, high-level participants in [Oil Shockwave] concluded yesterday."

Even without a large oil shock like those of the 1970s, relentless price increases and the possibility of declining global liquids output leading to supply shortfalls in the U.S within the next decade has led the Air Force to the coal-to-liquids solution. If the Air Force thought we were going to be swimming in oil by 2016, their target implementation date, they would not be proposing using F-T to meet their jet fuel needs.

Many obstacles stand in the way of the Air Force's plan. The climate change lobby is not going to roll over on the issue, which creates a bad precedent and provides momentum for carbon-intensive F-T operations in the United States. "I think across the board there is going to be opposition from the environmental movement," said John Topping, the president of the Climate Institute in Washington. "I'd say it's going to be almost universal because of the climate concerns" (McClatchy). The Congress will probably have a Democrat majority after the fall elections. This likely means tough sledding for the Air Force.

As awareness of the climate problem grows in the United States, the economic squeeze brought on by higher oil prices creates pressure to implement supply-side solutions to alleviate soaring diesel fuel costs.