UTA professors seek cheap fuel in coal-to-oil study

Futures prices on a barrel of oil last week wandered around the $42 a barrel mark, which for consumers at Tarrant County gas pumps translated to gasoline prices between $1.62 and $1.75 a gallon.

Those prices were considerably more affordable on pocketbooks than the almost $4-a-gallon prices of a few months ago. Happy days. But they could be even happier.

Consider this: What would that gasoline price be if oil was readily available at a more modest $25 a barrel?

The answer? Around a dollar per gallon, maybe a little less.

But $25 a barrel oil? Could that happen? According to University of Texas at Arlington researcher Richard Billo, associate dean of engineering for research, and Krishnan Rajeshwar, associate dean of the College of Science, that $25 a barrel price tag is possible. It is in fact probable and perhaps eminent, the idea being creation of synthetic oil made from coal, the equivalent of heavy crude.

This particular OPEC nightmare is not a pipe dream for American consumers. Billo and Rajeshwar are two of the mainstays of UTA’s Center for Renewable Energy Science and Technology (CREST), an entity exploring all kinds of alternative fuel sources. Those range from solar power and more efficient batteries to hydrogen cell technology and the aforementioned coal-to-oil conversion.

Indeed, CREST also has a $1 million earmark grant from Congress administered through the U.S. Department of Energy, the idea being to develop an affordable technology for coal-to-oil conversion.

Please note: The United States has some of the most extensive coal deposits on the planet, an estimated 200-year supply. Not to mention massive deposits of oil shales and sands for which technology like coal-to-oil conversion would also be applicable.

“There’s a trillion barrels of oil just in the shales of Utah, Wyoming and Colorado,” Rajashwar said.

This particular idea of converting coal or shales to oil is not a new one.

“During World War II when Germany was shut off from oil supplies, that country began converting coal with a somewhat expensive procedure called the Fisher-Tropsch process,” Rajeshwar said. “The technology is well established.”

Even with modern scientific methods the Fisher-Tropsch process is still expensive, which is why CREST continues to research an alternative fuel technology using microfluidics. Rajeshwar and Billo are convinced that a microfluidic reactor will convert coal to synthetic oil at a fraction of the cost of the German technology. Billo said microfluidics will also accomplish the conversion job far faster.

Microfluidic technology deals with the control and manipulation of fluids on a sub-millimeter scale. It’s a cousin of inkjet technology. A diesel-refining process developed and patented by UTA researchers using this style of technology will be used commercially for the first time this year. It essentially reduces the time needed to refine diesel fuel from 90 minutes to four minutes. CREST researchers will be using some of that same technology with the earmark grant for coal conversion.

Billo believes a microfluidic coal conversion refinery could be built for about $50 million that would produce as much crude oil as a billion-dollar factory built on Fisher-Tropsch techniques. Indeed, the critical issue now seems to center not so much on the technology as on refinements of assorted catalysts.

This is also not a far-into-the-future concept. Billo plans to produce a small scale prototype of the conversion process this very year.

“This is not hypothetical academia here,” Billo said. “What we’re doing here is producing real solutions to this country acquiring sustainable and affordable energy.”

The possibilities of this particular technology eventually making the U.S. energy independent have not gone unnoticed by members of Congress.

Texas U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Ennis, has high hopes for the project. It was his proposal that ended up providing the $1 million grant.

“We can keep oil and gasoline prices consumer-friendly if we use and support developing technology to unlock energy supplies here at home,” Barton said. ““It only makes sense to convert Texas coal to oil at a cost of $25 a barrel, instead of importing it from Saudi Arabia for $125 a barrel.”

Or for that matter, $42 a barrel – a price that no one expects to last for long, escalations in prices being inevitable over the long term.

okcarter@bizpress.net