Coal-to-liquids (CTL) is a process of producing synthetic transportation fuels from coal. The process involves gasification of coal to produce synthesis gas which is then catalytically converted to liquid fuels in a Fischer-Tropsch (FT) reactor. A major concern of CTL plants is their emissions of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) produced as part of the process. A significant fraction of the plant-level CO 2 is produced in the gasification process, which needs to be separated before the syngas is fed into the FT reactor. In this paper, CTL processes using two different coal-feeding methods–slurry and dry–are studied for their effect on the performance, emissions and cost of a CTL plant. The slurry-fed and dry-fed systems are modeled based on the commercially available GE and Shell gasifier designs, respectively. Effect of implementing CCS or carbon constraints that impose a price or cost on CO 2 emissions is also studied. The potential of the co-production configuration to reduce the overall CO 2 emissions by displacing conventional pulverized coal power plants is also investigated.It was found that the process using a dry-feed Shell gasification is more efficient, emits less CO 2 and has lower capital and product costs compared to a CTL plant using a slurry-feed GE gasifier. For both the cases, the costs of liquid product from both liquids-only and co-production plants are comparable to the crude oil prices seen in the past 2–3 years. Though co-production plants are much costlier than liquids-only configurations in terms of capital cost, because of the high electricity revenues, the cost of liquid product is lower than that of the liquids-only case, at market prices of electricity. Co-production is also much more efficient than the separate production of liquids and power and, the difference in efficiency increases with the addition of CCS.