Senators support new fuel plant

Washington— U.S. Senators Rick Santorum (R-PA), chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, and Arlen Specter (R-PA), the senior senator from Pennsylvania, announced that the U.S. Senate has approved language in the Energy bill that authorizes financing for the nation’s first clean coal-to-liquid fuel plant.

The language allows a portion of funds already appropriated to the Department of Energy and awarded to WMPI PTY LLC, a coal and energy company based in Schuylkill County Pennsylvania, through a Clean Coal Power Initiative (CCPI) competitive grant to be used to fund a federal loan guarantee for WMPI’s coal-to-diesel project.

The company projects that 1,600 jobs will be created at the Schuylkill County plant alone. This Fischer-Tropsch technology project, which turns waste coal into high quality zero-sulfur diesel fuel, will be the first coal-to-liquid fuel project in the U.S. This technology has the potential to dramatically reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign oil.

Although this technology is not new or unproven, no other project of its kind exists in the U.S. Domestic energy security should be considered a national priority.