[Old School]

CTL was developed in the 1920's and was used extensively during WWII, and in South Africa since the mid 50's. The CTL process has been improved significantly over the past decade and as I said earlier we will continue to enhance the refining process. Just last week Consol Energy and Synthesis Energy Systems introduced a plan to make gasoline for the Chemical Industry and capable of producing 100 million gallons of gasoline per year, and guess what Consol and Synthesis is footing the bill, no tax payer monies are being spent on this project. Pike County has also developed a plan to convert coal into liquid at a rate of 50,000 barrels per day. Federal and State money would be spent on the basic infrastructure, water and sewer but the operator would pay for the rest. Once the plant is in full operation it is expected to employ about 750 people with an average salery of $50,000 per year, coach if I remember correctly you have always complained about high unemployment rate, and the lack of good paying jobs in Eastern Ky.

Several companies, are currently in the process of obtaining the needed permits to open CTL plants, which will be able to convert coal into liquid for $45-$50 per barrel.



Where ANWR is concerned...I just don't see how pumping an additional 1-1.5 million barrels of oil into our system could not help our current situation, plus the millions of barrels of oil from the coast would have to have a positive impact on our energy and economic needs. Now don't give me it will take ten years to develop these areas, oil experts claim that we can be pumping oil from the coast in about 2 years, remember if Clinton had allowed drilling in ANWR in 1995 instead of placing it off limits we could be using that 1.5 million barrels today instead of later.

As you well know we are addicted to oil, nearly 70% of our oil is imported from other countries like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Nigeria, the U.S. currently produces 5 million barrels of oil daily, we import about 5 million barrels daily from OPEC and another 5 million barrels from other countries, so basically we produce about one-third of the oil we use every day.

What would happen if just the OPEC countries decided to send their oil to Chinia or Russia instead of the U.S.? This is one reason why the U.S. military is experimenting with CTL fuel.

This is why I think we need to drill anywhere and everywhere we can, we need to use coal to liquid technologies, so we can decrease our oil dependency from foreign Countries and also bring more jobs into the U.S. thus helping the economy.