About Coal Liquefaction

[ralphhugh]

Coal liquefaction is the conversion of coal into a synthetic oil in order to supplement natural sources of petroleum. It is an attractive technology because 1) it is well developed and thus could be implemented fairly rapidly and 2) there are relatively large quantities of coal reserves. Coal liquefaction is seen by many as a necessary technology to replace other sources of transportation fuels before production of biofuels or fuel cells can be ramped up to meet the gap left by declining supplies of oil. Hirsch, SAIC, 2/05, p56 found that coal liquefaction and heavy oil refining were potentially the two largest sources of transportation fuels that could be used to mitigate the peaking of conventional oil. The Hirsch report is the most comprehensive and authoritative analysis of mitigating peak oil.

[FleetMan]

As you say, coal to liquid fuel is an available and proven process. There is a plant near Gilberton, PA which was built several years ago to do just that. The State of Pennsylvania contracted to purchase the major portion of their output but to the best of my knowledge, it has yet to go into commercial operation due to anti -coal litigation. Another plant in North Dakota is in production. Fuel from there was used in the US Air Force B-52 test on using jet fuel derived from coal.

[SmokeyWren]

Note that the link is to an Austrailian company involved in converting coal into gas and then that gas into synthetic diesel. I looked but didn't find the approximate amount a barrel of oil would have to cost before the project would be cost effective.

Way back in the 1940s, Nazi Germany converted coal into liquid fuel because American airpower wiped out the oil fields where they had been getting their oil. But in a free market the cost of that fuel was much higher than economically feasible, so the end of WW-II ended that project.

The technology is available today, but cost effectiveness is usually the problem. Socialist economies engage in projects that are not cost effective all the time. But in order for an Exxon or a Chevron in a capitalist economy to tackle a project such as turning coal into diesel or oil shale into gasoline, the cost of the finished product must be competitive with equivalent products produced from old fashioned petroleum available on the open market.

Right now oil is selling for around $40 per bbl. Experts mostly agree that the cost of oil will settle around $65 per bbl within a year or so. But until it does, you probably won't see many investors spending their money on coal liquidification or shale oil extraction projects. Quazi-socialist Canada is sucking oil out of tar sands, but right now that project is losing money. But, yes, there are some gamblers in the investment world (socialists call them "speculators"), so companies like OLink Energy are growing.

[ralphhugh]

There are more advantages of coal like it can be used for generating power, coal can be converted into liquids,gases and can be used as diesel also

[ralphhugh]

Methods of coal liquefaction have been available since the beginning of the last century, but the cost has caused us to search for more effective new processes,” explains Matthias W. Haenel. Coal is a complicated, difficult to analyze mixture of organic components. In what is called the Bergius process for direct coal liquefaction, the coal is treated with hydrogen under pressure (>30 MPa) at 450 °C in the presence of a solvent and an iron oxide catalyst. The activity of this catalyst is low, however, because the solid iron oxide cannot enter the macromolecular network structure of the insoluble coal. Semianthracite coal, which only contains a small amount of volatile components, cannot be converted by this process at all. Haenel and his team hoped that a soluble catalyst would serve them better.