Crowing About CTL, Part 2  

The Australian reports that aspiring CTL (coal to liquids) and urea entrepreneur Allan Blood has grabbed a stake in the Crow CTL project in Montana I mentioned recently - Aussie coal deal with Montana's Crow tribe. As usual they are dreaming about a way of sequestering all the carbon dioxide produced.

WITH oil prices seemingly entrenched above long-term averages, Perth businessman Allan Blood has struck a deal with Montana's Crow tribe to look at building a $US7 billion ($8 billion) plant to turn their stranded coal reserves into diesel and jet fuel.

In a twist to local greenhouse gas capture schemes, Mr Blood plans to limit emissions from the project by selling carbon dioxide to Montana oil projects to inject into their fields and improve oil recovery.

If all goes to plan, the project will be profitable at oil prices above $US60 a barrel and could be producing 50,000 barrels daily by 2016. Mr Blood also has plans to develop a coal-to-urea plant in Victoria's La Trobe Valley.

The deal inked last week, calls for the Crow Nation to provide coal and water, and Mr Blood's unlisted Australian American Energy Co will provide funding and project management.

The coal will be mined above ground and converted to diesel using processes similar to those of South African synthetic fuels company Sasol.

Sasol's process produces more than twice the greenhouse emissions of a normal oil refinery, but the Montana project, known as Many Stars, will minimise these by either storing CO2 or selling it to nearby oil producers. "We're hoping to sell all the CO2 that gets trapped, as a by-product," he said. There were more than 8000km of dedicated CO2 pipeline in the US, he said.