CTL and GTL Fuels

Knowledge Problem discusses the economics of Coal-To-Liquids processing and touches on Gas-To-Liquids as well.

Currently, CTL is about $40/barrel to produce. This could come down to $35/barrel over time from volume production and improvements. (Compare this to oil at $5-$10/barrel.)

From the comments, it looks like it produces a lot of heavy metals, but uranium, mercury, and other metals could be extracted from the waste to lower the overall cost.

One other benefit is that CTL technologies use cogeneration/combined heat and power (CHP) technology in production, enabling the capture and recycling of waste heat and gases. With respect specifically to electricity generation, CHP can achieve fuel efficiency levels around 80%, while a conventional large-scale coal-fired generation plant has fuel efficiency levels around 33%. Thus with CHP you get more output from a given BTUs worth of fuel because less is wasted, and you also reduce pollution emissions (including CO2, if you want to consider that a pollutant) in the process. However, most petroleum refining (and petrochemical) production also use CHP processes, so that's not necessarily an incremental benefit relative to existing petroleum product manufacturing processes.

It still seems like this would be a benefit over purely coal-driven plants.