USAF Synthetic fuel program could help solve unwanted carbon problem.

• Author: Frodl, Michael G.
• Position: VIEW POINT

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The Air force is seeking to acquire 50 percent of its fuel needs from domestic sources by 2016, and half of that is expected to come from synthetic fuel, mainly made from coal.

The Air Force has promised that the synthetic fuel program will not release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than fuel made from crude oil. This has created an opportunity for accelerated development of C[O.sub.2] capture technologies, which promise to solve not only the Air Force's immediate problem, but also those of many industries that rely on fossil fuels and face C[O.sub.2] regulation.

If the revenues from industrial use of recovered C[O.sub.2] are factored into the equation, C[O.sub.2] capture will become much more promising commercially. The industrial uses of C[O.sub.2] are many, and demand promises to be global.

The Air Force energy program is, perhaps, the most ambitious of all the military energy security programs, given just how big the service's fuel needs are. The federal government consumes almost 2 percent of all fossil fuels burned in the United States, and the military consumes the majority of the federal government's piece. The Air Force by itself consumes the largest share--about 1 percent of all fossil fuel consumption in the United States.

Shifting half a percent of all U.S. consumption of fossil fuels to another source is no small task.

The synthetic fuels that the Air Force needs will principally come from the conversion of coal into liquids. The technology to do this has been around for almost a century--for example, the "Fischer-Tropsch" process developed in Germany just before World War II.

By the end the war, most of the German military was using synthetic fuels. The process was further tweaked by the South Africans during a long trade embargo. Today, all international flights into South Africa refuel using synthetic jet fuel made from coal.

After World War II, the U.S. government sought to develop a domestic synthetic fuel industry to reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil. But despite billions invested in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the comparative price of oil was too low to justify the investment and Washington pulled the plug on the program.

The synthetic fuels program was resurrected in the 1970s after the Arab oil embargo, but shut down again in the 1980s. When U.S. oil drilling and refining slowed down after Hurricane Katrina, fuel costs ballooned. The Air Force faced a major increase in...