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Coal-to-Liquid Fuels: WATER
What about the Water?
As is
the case with coal-to-electricity plants, coal-to-liquids plants
consume massive quantities of water—the second major concern. By some
estimates, Fischer-Tropsch refineries use up to five gallons of water
for every gallon of liquid fuel produced. For a 22,000 barrel-per-day
operation, that means 1.7 billion gallons of water per year—the same
amount that would be used by the proposed Highwood Generating Station
in Great Falls, and enough water to meet the domestic needs of 26,000
people.
| "The place
where people are developing coalbed methane is the place where people
make a living irrigating. The coalbed methane company is going to come
and go in 10 years. But that rancher and his family have been there for
150 years. Who's going to take care of that rancher's grandchildren
when there's no water?" ~ Gov. Brian Schweitzer,
"Montana Pollution Rules Draw Federal Objections," by Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, April 9, 2006 |
It is important to realize that Gov. Schweitzer’s vision for a coal-to-liquids industry in Montana is much larger than this one plant. He has advocated using the 600 million tons of State-owned coal in the Otter Creek tracts for this purpose, and has frequently mentioned a production target of 150,000 barrels of synfuel per day or more—7 times as much as the proposed Roundup plant. Offsetting just 1% of the nation’s imported oil requirements would require 1.2 million barrels per day of synfuel production—55 Roundup-sized projects.
At this point, it is not at all clear where the Roundup project could obtain this amount of water. According to Wilbur Wood, a Roundup-area resident and co-chair of the Alternative Energy Resource Organization’s Energy Task Force: “No surface water source in the Musselshell River basin can come anywhere close to meeting this demand. Assuming water rights could be obtained on the Yellowstone River (a large assumption in itself) then a very big pipeline would have to be constructed, and one obstacle to this is that, at the moment, inter-basin transfers of water are not legal. The only other source of water in those quantities is 8,600 feet underground: the Madison Aquifer. The Madison, under the Little Belt and Snowy Mountains, yields some of the finest water on the planet, but by the time it has dived under the Bull Mountains it has become both hot (some say 200 degrees Fahrenheit at that depth) and quite full of minerals, salts, etc. Mining the Madison Aquifer to create liquid fuel out of coal may itself be a very bad idea, but it certainly is also a very expensive idea. It costs money to pull up water from that depth, money to remove the salts from this water, and money to ‘dispose’ of these salts—if you can figure out where to put them.”