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United States Patent Application: 0100285576
We struggled a bit trying to compose a colorful and attention-grabbing way of introducing what we present in this dispatch: a more productive and CO2-free way of converting our abundant Coal into liquid hydrocarbons.
But, if a simple and straightforward statement of the truth isn't enough to gain the notice of the political leaders and the public voices of US Coal Country, then we US Coal Country citizens, as a people, as a community, have far, far deeper problems than constraints on our supply of Oil, or some conjectural "War On Coal" spun up in the public press cotton candy machine to attract shallow attention and sell papers.
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We've made a number of reports on the what might be the surprisingly large potentials for utilizing our Coal Ash, aka, "Coal Combustion Byproducts" or, just "CCBs", what we here insist is a raw material resource of unrecognized value, as a mineral "filler" in various types of molded plastic.
As we've explained, various minerals, most usually in the form of fine particles, or fibers of various sizes and types, are commonly blended into a plastic resin before the resin is molded, one way or another, into it's final form.
That practice can offer a number of benefits. Not only does it most often reduce the cost of whatever article might be produced, it can also, depending on the choice of filler, enhance or improve some specific physical properties of that article.
And, concerning plastic, and plastic resins, it's important to keep in mind that there are, to generalize, two types that we have to deal with: "Thermoset" and "Thermoplastic".
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A little more than two years ago, Vice President Joe Biden indirectly confirmed that Carbon Dioxide, as it arises in only a very small way, relative to natural sources of emission such as volcanoes, from our essential use of Coal in the generation of truly economical electric power, is a valuable raw material resource.
As we explain, following brief introductory excerpts from the above link to:
"Vice President Biden Announces Recovery Act Funding for 37 Transformational Energy Research Projects
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Washington, DC – At a Recovery Act Cabinet Meeting today, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced that the U.S. Department of Energy is awarding $106 million in funding for 37 ambitious research projects that could fundamentally change the way the country uses and produces energy. Funded through DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), the $106 million is awarded to projects that could produce advanced biofuels more efficiently from renewable electricity instead of sunlight ... and remove the carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants in a more cost-effective way.
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Energy Citations Database (ECD) - - Document #766412
Unfortunately, concerning the headline we selected for this dispatch, a large group of knowledgeable and accomplished scientists, assembled by our United States Department of Energy to assess the technologies and economies of indirectly, through gasification, converting our abundant domestic Coal into a full range of hydrocarbon fuels and chemicals, said, all the way back in 1987, that such Coal conversion technology was so advanced and so effective, and the economic reasons for doing it were so compelling, that it would become "the wave of the future", sweeping us all up in a tsunami of domestic hydrocarbon self-sufficiency by, they opined, 2010.
It's now 2012. Are your feet even wet? Ours neither.
And, it kind of makes you wonder why.
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Energy Citations Database (ECD) - - Document #766412
Unfortunately, concerning the headline we selected for this dispatch, a large group of knowledgeable and accomplished scientists, assembled by our United States Department of Energy to assess the technologies and economies of indirectly, through gasification, converting our abundant domestic Coal into a full range of hydrocarbon fuels and chemicals, said, all the way back in 1987, that such Coal conversion technology was so advanced and so effective, and the economic reasons for doing it were so compelling, that it would become "the wave of the future", sweeping us all up in a tsunami of domestic hydrocarbon self-sufficiency by, they opined, 2010.
It's now 2012. Are your feet even wet? Ours neither.
And, it kind of makes you wonder why.
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