Just about everywhere Gov. Brian Schweitzer goes in Montana–or elsewhere, for that matter–he brings along a dog, a black rock and a small vial of clear, nearly odorless fluid.
The dog is his 2-year-old border collie, Jag, a highly obedient, camera-friendly companion helping to fill out the relentlessly down-home image honed by the Democratic governor, who wears jeans, bolo ties and boots to most public events.
The rock is a lump of coal, of which there are roughly 120 billion tons sitting just beneath the lonesome plains of eastern Montana. And the fluid is a synthetic fuel derived from the coal.
Coals-to-fuel, says the governor, a soils scientist who lived in the Middle East for eight years in the 1980s, will be “the greatest boon to engineering and technology since NASA was created” in the late 1950s. With Montana coal, the United States could unleash itself from “the sheiks, the dictators, the rats and crooks around the world who are bent on destroying our way of life.”
Schweitzer could just as well be selling snake oil, to hear some of his critics tell it. One environmental group dismisses his promise of earth-friendly coal development this way: “The term `clean coal’ is like saying `safe cigarettes.'”
But while the coal remains largely untapped, Schweitzer is not going unnoticed.
A Democrat in a conservative state that gave President Bush nearly 60 percent of the vote in the last two presidential elections, Schweitzer, 50, is riding a wave of popularity here: 68 percent approval ratings in one recent independent poll. Another poll, by the Montana Chamber of Commerce, found that 57 percent believed Montana’s state government was headed in the right direction, while only 47 percent thought that way about the state’s economy.
Critics in GOP
Schweitzer’s success rankles GOP leaders here. “All hat and no cattle,” one says of his showmanship; another calls him “a loose cannon.”
But it intrigues some Democrats, who wonder if Schweitzer is exactly the sort of “red-state” national candidate who could help the party break beyond the “blue zone” of electoral votes that has kept it out of the White House in the last two presidential elections. Democrats have won along the West Coast, and in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions, but endured a virtual shutout in the South, the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountain states.
So far, Schweitzer certainly seems to have demonstrated one natural politician’s gift, that of being able to frame the question. No matter what he gets asked about, he somehow manages to point his answer toward a single word: coal.
“Why, if we just started with that,” the governor said of his coal-development program recently as his plane bumped around the state, “it will lead to all kinds of other good things. Energy independence from these dictators. . . . It will create jobs. It will spread to education, to developing engineers and to all kinds of other investments.”
It is possible to turn coal into synthetic fuel, with a chemical process that has been tweaked for decades and that was perhaps most notably employed by Nazi Germany once its path to oil was blocked in World War II. And with the process yielding about two barrels per ton, Montana theoretically could produce 240 billion barrels–or about 30 years’ worth of the oil now consumed annually in the United States.
Schweitzer concedes that the coal-to-fuel plan only makes sense economically if the worldwide average price of crude oil remains above about $35 a barrel. But on Wednesday it was more than twice that, rising to $72 to set yet another record.
Process still scrutinized
Because there are still engineering issues to be worked out, Schweitzer acknowledges that companies are not clamoring to build plants. “Everybody wants to be the first one to build the second plant,” is how he optimistically puts it.
Environmentalists also say the process is a long way from the holy grail of creating a synthetic fuel whose climate-warming carbon could be reliably stripped. Most current coal-to-liquids plants create huge pollution problems, they point out.
None of this stops the governor from pushing his state’s product, and his ability to focus the political dialogue here on jobs and the economy has garnered wide attention, from a CBS News “60 Minutes” segment on his coal plans to a prediction in Roll Call, a bible for Capitol Hill insiders, that he would emerge as “a dark-horse candidate for president in 2008.”
Schweitzer dismisses speculation about his candidacy for a national office as “kooky” and “silly talk.” He says he’s got “the best job in America” and would be crazy to want to live in the White House. His state has “only three electoral votes.”
Strictly speaking, none of that amounts to a categorical denial.
