“It’s a big carbon dioxide factory,” said IEA analyst Laszlo Varro about China's growing 'coal to liquid' enterprise

5/24/13, "The worst consequences of the global warming scare," Watts Up with That, Guest blogger, David Archibald

"During World War II, one Russian physicist realized that the United States was working on an atomic bomb when articles about high energy nuclear reactions disappeared from the physics journals he subscribed to. As an interested observer of coal-to-liquids (CTL) developments, I got the same feeling when reading the programme for the World CTL Conference 2013 held in Shanghai on 16^th April. There was almost nothing about China’s CTL projects.

We all know that China has building coal-fired power stations at the rate of one a week. They are also building a number of CTL projects. News on these projects now seems to come largely from Western equipment suppliers. For example, the MAN Group of Germany announced the sale of compressors for the Shenhua Ningxia CTL project. The compressors will be used to make 40,000 tonnes per day of oxygen 

which equates to 
CTL production of 120,000 barrels per day.

Shenhua is China’s largest coal company. The Shenhua website doesn’t mention the Shenhua Ningxia CTL project which would have a capital cost of the order of $10 billion. In fact the company’s news section on its website hasn’t been updated for a year. 

It seems that news on CTL projects in China has gone dark.

Why would that be? Let’s go on to look at the state of fill of the Chinese strategic petroleum reserves as outlined in this document. China has accelerated the rate of build and fill of its strategic petroleum reserves in the last few years. It could reach its formal target of almost 700 million barrels, equivalent to the US strategic reserve, by 2015. This graph shows the comparative size of the US, Japanese and Chinese strategic petroleum reserves:

I believe that the reason China has gone dark on its CTL projects is because it considers that they give the country a competitive advantage. Shenhua has stated that its first CTL plant, a direct liquefaction facility in the Ordos Basin, has an all-in cost of $60 per barrel and that it is very profitable. Now any company, and any country, in the world that has coal deposits could copy Shenhua’s successful example and start making money from their own CTL projects. That isn’t happening. Why might that be?

A big clue is in the quote following from an interview with an International Energy Agency analyst.  

The role of the International Energy Agency, based in Paris and largely funded by the United States, is to talk down the oil price as a counterpoint to OPEC. It is not to be confused with the Energy Information Administration, part of the US Government.

During a recent briefing in Washington, D.C., IEA analyst Laszlo Varro was pessimistic about CTL. 

“Essentially, energy policy needs to replicate a war blockade,” he said. “The only country that has meaningful investments in coal to liquids is China.”
 
Varro added, “It’s a big carbon dioxide factory.”

With the EPA in the United States hell bent on closing down existing coal-fired power stations using carbon dioxide emissions as the excuse, getting funding for a new coal-burning facility of any sort is going to be a difficult sell. The consequence of that is that the United States is denying itself its largest potential source of liquid transport fuels commercially viable with current oil prices and technology (that definition allows me to avoid mentioning the Green River Shale)....

For those who still think that the Bakken Formation in North Dakota has untold wealth and should be factored in, the United States Geological Survey recently released an assessment of that formation’s potential of 7.4 billion barrels of undiscovered, potentially recoverable oil. So the potential of the Bakken accounts for about one and a half years of the current consumption rate.

The United States currently burns about one billion tonnes of coal per annum in power stations. Put through CTL plants, that one billion tonnes could make 2.2 billion barrels of liquid transport fuels, largely replacing the imported component of oil demand and making the country energy independent. 

It is not the price of oil that is stopping that from happening. It is the witchcraft and voodoo of official climate science. Of course the electric power coming from coal would have to come from another source, but that is doable too."...via Climate Depot

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In Dec. 2010 at Cancun 'climate summit,' China threatened to spew extra poisonous gas into the atmosphere if anyone messed with the hundreds of millions in profits it's making via UN CDM deals. (near end of Yale 360 piece)

12/13/10, "‘Perverse’ CO2 Payments Send Flood of Money to China," by Mark Schapiro, Yale Environment 360

"The controversy over hfc’s came to a head at the climate negotiations in Cancun last week (Dec. 2010). Last Tuesday, Chen Huan, deputy director of China’s CDM Fund, the recipient of the hfc tax revenues, denounced the attempts to reduce the use of hfc credits as “irresponsible,” and attacked the calculations on which they are based as “implausible” and lacking in documentation. He threatened that Chinese industries

would vent hfc gases without government controls if the
 
subsidy program was discontinued, telling Point Carbon News — a market monitoring and news service —that efforts to stop the credits are “not acceptable for China because it deviates from the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities.”...
.

"To offset their own carbon emissions, European companies have been wildly overpaying China to incinerate a powerful greenhouse gas known as hfc 23. And in a bizarre twist, those payments have spurred the manufacture of a harmful refrigerant that is being smuggled into the U.S. and used illegally."...

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