Grumpster, I 'discovered' UCG (underground coal gassification) a few months ago and have been reading up on the Australian companies doing pilots. Couple of posters on those threads also had CTP.
I believe UCG is going to be huge. But very hard to figure out how to invest in it. Nobody has a patent lock on the technology so not clear that any of these small companies doing trials will be the big winners.
So now I am leaning toward investing in the companies with huge stranded coal resources. Linc now has a very nice resource base after buying Sapex, and more recently GasTech in US Poweder River Basin. But Linc seems absurdly over valued to me. CTP is maybe two orders of magnitude cheaper per ton of potential coal resource.
Wish I new how to post charts on HC. But this long term oil-supply cost curve from the IEA tells the story. It shows estimates of how expensive various liquid fuel resources are. They also show the estimated global resource for each category. Coal to liquids (CTL)is a 9000 billion barrel resources. I believe UCG will greatly reduce the cost and increase the resource of the CTL category. So this CTL box will move down and to the right. Huge economic consequences of this. The solution to peak oil -at least for a decade or two.
