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We feel compelled to urge study of, and reflection on, the full contents of this submission. Our handicaps simply don't allow us to explain it and distil it's essence nearly as adequately we would wish, nearly as adequately as the revelations confirmed in the full body of this US Government document deserve.
Note that we earlier made report of United States Patent 2,838,388, for "Gasifying Carbonaceous Fuels", which was issued, in June of 1958, to Texaco, then more formerly referred to as "The Texas Company", for a process wherein a "treatment of coal" was described. Such "treatment" entailed gasifying Coal "with oxygen and steam to produce a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen as the synthesis feed gas", which syngas could then "be converted to motor fuels by the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis".
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The patented General Electric technology for hydrogenating Coal, in order to synthesize hydrocarbon fuels, which we reveal herein, relates, somewhat sadly, both to another report, concerning South Africa and China, we're posting today, and, thus, to another, concerning GE and China, we'll be sending along tomorrow.
It also, though, serves to confirm a fact that we have otherwise been documenting:
Via one process or another, the Hydrogen needed to hydrogenate the primarily Carbon content of Coal, in order to synthesize liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons, can be obtained from Water through the employment of by-products, co-products or incremental products of the overall Coal conversion process.
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It goes without saying how much we all love our Big Oil conglomerates, such as Chevron, which began life as Standard Oil of California, and along it's amoebic way assimilated such sentimentally-remembered companies as Gulf and Texaco; and, of course, the genre's quintessential beast, ExxonMobil.
Now, unless we, in the US, move quickly to both embrace and reduce to practice the very real technologies which exist for converting our abundant Coal into the liquid hydrocarbons we need, we might soon have a new Frankenstein monster of fuels, pieced together out of disparate parts, to contend with.
We have, in the course of our dispatches, documented both the long-established Coal liquefaction expertise of South Africa's SASOL, and, the burgeoning Coal liquefaction industry in China.
As reported herein, they contemplate mating.
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Herein is yet another pre-ExxonMobil technology for converting Coal into liquid hydrocarbon fuels, from the old Mobil Oil Corporation.
We find it to be of great interest since it describes an advance on technology we have earlier documented, wherein the Hydrogen needed to hydrogenate Coal, in order to synthesize gaseous and liquid hydrocarbons, could be generated by Water-Carbon reactions, often in earlier work accomplished through the relatively simple expedient of passing Steam over hot Coal.
This Mobil process is much more sophisticated. In it, the needed Hydrogen is produced by reacting Water with Coal in the presence of Carbon Monoxide, which we can, most certainly, make from Coal.
The complete reaction is facilitated, apparently made possible, through the use of a reasonably common mineral.
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We have, in recent months, been reporting on technologies that have been developed, some by the petroleum industry and dating back to the 1940's, wherein Carbon Dioxide can be reacted with Methane, which itself, it has been known since award of the 1912 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Paul Sabatier, can be made from Carbon Dioxide, to synthesize higher hydrocarbons.
Those sorts of reactions are known as the "dry reforming", or "bi-reforming" of Carbon Dioxide, or of Methane, as opposed to "tri-reforming", wherein Steam, as we understand it, is added to the reaction mix of Methane and CO2. Tri-reforming, as we have reported, and as we hope to further report, is being further developed by a number of research facilities around the world, including, again as we have documented, Israel and Switzerland, and, more notably for us, Penn State University, NASA, and several technology corporations under contract to the United States Department of Defense.
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