Duh! I just heard about this coal to liquid fuel that apparently can solve all of our fuel problems... and has been around since the twenties. Come on! Why do we sit on this information forever? And then Bush is of course now yelling "OOO! OOO! I was just going to say coal to liquid is the answer! We are already flying planes with this stuff. Wow. Seems like it would run a car pretty well, huh?

Check this out from www.futurecoalfuels.org/security.asp. it says " In his State of the Union Address, President Bush acknowledged the growing energy challenge confronting the United States by setting a national goal of replacing 75 percent of U.S. energy imports from the Middle East by 2025. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 encouraged the development of alternative fuels such as coal-to-liquid (CTL) fuels and coal-derived natural gas substitutes, but its modest incentives are far too timid a response to today's stark realities.

For a forceful response to the energy challenge, the U.S. must make greater use of its unrivalled coal reserves — to provide significant new supplies of clean CTL fuels, to enhance oil and coal bed methane recovery and to produce ethanol.

The U.S. has 27 percent of world coal supply — the largest of any country — but less than 2 percent of the world's oil and less than 3 percent of its natural gas. By contrast, Iran and Russia together possess almost half of the world's supply of natural gas.

Production of coal-derived liquid fuels would expand potential uses of America's nearly 250 billion tons of recoverable coal reserves beyond electricity generation to help reduce our reliance on foreign sources of oil, while promoting national security and providing for sustained economic growth.

With coal reserves and production dispersed widely among more than two dozen states, the U.S. boasts a geographic diversity of domestic fuel supply that is less susceptible to natural disasters and terrorist threat.

Producing CTL fuel does not depend on unproven technology nor require extensive R&D. China is already building a $2 billion CTL plant that will begin using its coal reserves in the fall of 2007, and plans to build many more.

Moreover, U.S. coal reserves cannot be nationalized by a foreign government, require no costly armed forces to protect, nor costly exploration efforts to discover.

Establishing a goal of producing at least 300,000 barrels of high-grade fuel per day by 2015 using CTL technology is a feasible target. This is equivalent to the amount of transportation fuel consumed daily by the U.S. military for domestic operations. In fact, military and commercial aviation are promising early markets. The Department of Defense is already studying the advantages of CTL fuels to serve our armed forces on the ground and in the air.

For these reasons, CTL fuels are among the most practical, promising answers to greater energy security for the United States."

Of course, now just wait for all the arguing and bickering to start while we still get raped every time we fill up. They wont do anything on this for years. My question is, if its already been around since the 20's, how come we havent done more with it yet? Probably because they are not done milking the big fat oily cash cow yet.  ¶ 7:16 AM