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We recently posted evidence that we have known, officially, in the United States, for more than sixty years, that we can recycle Carbon Dioxide into liquid fuels, through our presentation of US Patent 2467966, "Conversion of Hydrocarbons", which was issued to Oklahoma's Phillips Petroleum in 1949.
We have since learned that, even earlier, only nineteen years after Europe's Nobel Committee affirmed, through award of it's 1912 Prize in Chemistry to Paul Sabatier, that Carbon Dioxide could be effectively recycled into valuable products such as Methane, so did the United States Patent Office, through award of the enclosed United States Patent to a company based in Pittsburgh, PA.
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The inventor named herein, Bruce Schmid, was actually employed at a Pittsburg and Midway, or P&M, (Coal) Mining Company facility in Colorado, which was a western US subsidiary, or division, of Pittsburgh, PA's Gulf Oil.
Don't be misled by apparent spelling inconsistencies. P&M Mining was originally named for, and headquartered in, Pittsburg, Kansas.
As it relates to other of our previous posts concerning the development of Coal liquefaction technologies by various corporate entities, and to others pending, keep in mind that Gulf Oil Corporation ceased to exist as an independent company in 1984, when it merged with Standard Oil of California. The new company renamed itself "Chevron".
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Other web sites indicate the inventor named herein, George Hsu, is employed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, at the California Institute of Technology. And, one provision within the full Patent declares the United States Government's interests, as in:
"The invention described herein was made in the performance of work under a NASA contract...".
So, we'll presume our rocket scientists figured out, successfully, more than 30 years ago, as the patent seems to attest, how to make rocket fuel from Coal.
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United States Patent: 4197421
We have previously cited the US Department of Energy scientist, Meyer Steinberg, at the DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory, in New York.
Herein, it's seen that, three decades ago, Steinberg, and our own United States Government, developed and patented a technology that would enable us to both capture and recycle atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.
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United States Patent: 4138224
We have previously documented, from several sources, that the carbonaceous residues left by some processes of indirect Coal conversion could be themselves further treated, by different techniques, so as to yield even more hydrocarbon values.
The example we most often refer to is the US Government-sponsored development, by FMC Corporation and ARCO, of the "COED" process at a New Jersey pilot plant. In that effort, carbonaceous residues left by their initial processing of Coal, via an indirect Coal conversion technique, were, as we've documented, shipped all the way to Spain for further treatment and extraction with the Hydrogen-donor solvent, Tetralin; in a process we perceive to be very similar to what we understand of WVU's "West Virginia Process" for the direct liquefaction of Coal.
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