Greater use of America’s enormous coal reserves is urgently needed to strengthen the nation’s energy security in the face of growing global competition for offshore energy and the rising costs of importing it, a coal industry executive told a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on April 24. In the near term, "liquefied coal can replace approximately 5% of our annual oil imports beginning no later than 2010," said James F. Roberts, President and CEO of Foundation Coal, who testified on behalf of the National Mining Association. "Coal gasification can make more efficient use of America’s unrivalled coal reserves — leading to clean, high-quality transportation fuel, abundant feedstock to produce ethanol and affordable energy to power our industrial facilities."

Roberts said the confluence of high oil prices, competition from fast-growing industrial powers, and rising US dependence on off-shore energy justifies bolder approaches to using domestic energy sources such as coal. "The Energy Act of 2005 was necessary to increase base load electric generation capacity, but not sufficient" to break the US economy’s addiction to foreign energy, said Roberts. "We literally can no longer afford the complacency of past decades."

Projections by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of increasing US energy dependence on foreign oil may be conservative, warned Roberts, as EIA assumes a modest contribution from coal-derived fuels equivalent to no more than 8% of projected oil imports over the long term. Roberts called this projection "too timid."

"Absent large scale developments of this fuel source," he said, "net imports will be significantly higher" than EIA projections. The technology exists today to produce a range of clean fuels from coal capable of meeting the most stringent air quality standards, he said. China is already moving aggressively to develop its coal reserves with $30 billion of gasification and liquefaction projects in the planning stages, said Roberts.

US recoverable coal reserves of 275,000 Mt — the world’s largest — is a resource, said Roberts, that "no foreign government can nationalize, that requires no costly armed forces to protect abroad, and no exploration budget to locate."