Coal as the fuel of the future

I just saw a short piece on the news about Sasol, a South African company that's promising to produce gasoline from coal (profitably and with lower emissions). It seems that every few weeks we hear some scientist or company announce that they're about to release some revolutionary new fuel or fuel system that will solve all our oil woes.

I'm pretty jaded to it at this point.

On the other hand, I've only really been keyed in to these technologies for the past few years, which is significantly shorter than most development pipelines. Maybe some of these new systems really will sweep away our energy problems in the near future. In the meantime we need to commit ourselves to make the policy changes that will encourage future technological development while making the most of what we already have (e.g. energy conservation!).

It does appeal to me to be able to use coal as an energy source. It would seem like a waste not to take advantage of such an abundant natural resource - especially one so common in the U.S. Any move to take advantage of this technology would need to (from the start) plan how to deal with environmental effects though. I still haven't seen any sufficient efforts to sequester carbon, let alone enough to offset burning even more coal than we already do. Not to mention that coal is often mined by shearing off mountain tops....

Maybe we'd be better off without this technology after all.