The Senator from Colorado talks about America always laying the claim that we are the Saudi Arabia of coal, except we are rapidly deciding we are not going to use it for anything. Now, if we are going to use it, and it is the great energy supply, then we have to make it cleaner, and that is clearly the technology at hand.
One of the ways to do so, and not only to use it for transportation fuels, is to run it through the liquefication process. And who is the expert in the field of testing it?
The Idaho National Laboratory, working with Baard Energy, looked at the Ohio projects - 46 percent cleaner. If you add biomass to it, 30 percent biomass to sequester the carbon dioxide and the combined cycle cogeneration process, that is what you get.
Now, isn't that a technology worth passing on to China, which is the largest emitter, or soon will be, producing more emission with less economy of CO2 than the United States? I think it is time we pushed all technologies, and if they are cleaner, they are better.
The argument here is they have to be perfect before we do them. I would suggest that perfect may not be possible, but 50 percent cleaner or more is possible, and that is where we ought to go. That is where the Bunning amendment takes us.
I tell you what I am going to do; I am going to vote for Senator Bunning's amendment, and I am going to vote against Saudi Arabia.