How to manufacture coal oil/gas

My understanding is that coal oil is similar to diesel, and propane like gas is released in the "distilling" process. SO, other than the EPA and green people,why isn't someone working harder on these processes ? We are setting on more coal BTUs than all the oil in the middle east, until the 1920-30s many cities had their own conversion plants for street lights and coal oil was a by product for sale to homes for lanterns and heating, then Pa.,Ok., and Tx. found oil that was cheaper to process. Someone help with more facts, please, this is all I know and it maybe wrong. Thanks

Speaking of coal.. several years ago I got to tour a coal fired electric generating plant. I was impressed how the coal is burned. The coal was ground down to a talcum powder consistency then blown it a hugh "firebox" through big burners about 3' in diameter. On tv screens you could see the flames, it looked like they were burning gas. They said there's no "klinkers" or even ash collecting in the firebox. An enormous electrical grid catches fly ash, and hardly anything was coming from the very tall smoke stack. So.... if they can burn coal that way, generating steam to turn the turbines, how about using a similar process to run steam trains again? At least powderize the coal so it burns more completely. Then burn the coal we have and quit using trucks so much. I think there's a lot that can be done, but the govn't stands in the way- as with coal oil too.

Good question - but of course the answer is that to the greeies it is not really about finding alternatives, it is really about controling people and politics. 30 years ago the City of Wichita built a coal gasification plant and it worked well but wan't ecconomically feasible with the costs of the day. But it wasn't rocket science and was clean.

Yep, and those coal gasification plants are now Superfund cleanup sites.
Local electric company here inherited one in a merger and spent millions on a cleanup for activities that occured 70 or 80 years ago.

The gas that comes off of it is flammable, but more like a low grade natural gas, not as many BTU's as propane.

The smart way to use coal is to burn it the most efficient and cleanest way. That is to burn it in power plants where the NOX, SOX, particulate and mercury are scrubbed out of the stack gases.

I think the big limiting factor for steam locomotives was water. They had to stop to take on a load of water quite often.

I'm told there used to be at least a couple places here in Ohio where steam trains took on water while traveling, so no doubt it was done other places too. I'm told there was a long trough of water between the tracks in level stretches, the train operator (probably the fireman) lowered a scoop of some sort into the trough and by momentum the water flowed into the tender. Probably like fire fighting planes scooping water from a lake. With ingenuity things can be overcome. I'd also think with computer controlled systems nowadays, train cars could be uncoupled as a train traveled and the cars brought to a stop where needed- like a roller coaster.(which would require having the train in the right order).

I would like to see more rice coal, or coal pellets for stoves and diesel made from coal.....but like anything in this country the politicians and green piece idiots will wreck it.

bil used to dry his corn with a big coal fired dryer. about 75,000 bushels/yr. he is not doing it anymore and I never asked him why he stopped.

If you really check the figures, coal fired steam engines are not all that efficient.

I disagree. We have a gasification plant working here in N.D. The only one of it"s kind in thi s part of the world besides one in Africa. It is making natural gas from coal plus a lot of byproducts. Helped build it in 1980 to 1985.

Fischer-Trosch or something like that was process used in WW2 by Germans to make fuel from coal. South Africa used same basic process when Apartheid Embargo was going on. Known technowlogy, known cost to operate- 25-30% of coal energy is used to make the liquid truck fuel- light oil/diesel - and pollution cleanup cost ad a little more. A matter of cost of competing fuel source and energy to process. getting competitive now. RN

How much other fuels does it put out? Diesel? Nat. gas? Gallons/day.?

I don't have the output but one of the byproducts is being piped to Canada to use in their oil processing. It has been running 24/7 since it was built except for repair and maintenance shut downs. It passed all tests for polution and etc. when it was built. Now they have, epa, etc., made stricter rules so they have to improve their systems more I guess.

Hey, gun guru, go to google and punch in DAKOTA GASIFICATION PLANT and it will give some info.

My grandfather used to live in Wayne, Michigan, and work in Detroit. About 20 - 25 minutes if the traffic is ok. Until 1947 or so, he took the "Inter urban" train from Wayne to Detroit. Since he worked in a big plant, they had a stop right in front of his workplace. It took 14 minutes. All electric, ran down the middle of Michigan Avenue. After WW2, GM and other companies bought up the train companies and put them out of business.

"Coal Gas" was Carbon Monoxide. The old gas plants are environmental sites now because they just disposed of a lot of the tar, etc on site.

I'm not sure how they produced it. You can make CO my limiting the oxygen for incomplete combustion. Or at temps > 1,200ºF 1CO2 + 1C = 2CO.

That is where the phrase "jerk water town" came from.

You're right....steam locos weren't that efficient....too much heat and lost water belching from those stacks but modern technology could do a lot to bring that waste down to a more acceptable minimum, First though, you've got to suppress the oil lobby from influencing and suppressing the research programs in steam power like they did when they started pushing diesel locos back in the 30's and 40's. Big oil used their power and influence to stifle all kinds of reseach involved in making other forms of making power more efficient...while petroleum product engines continue to this day to emit heat laden gases from their exhausts making them quite inefficient too. What's wrong with that picture?????? Lost heat is inefficiency....no doubt about it no matter how big...or small the exhaust pipe is. Look at those big twin 5 inch chrome stacks on a 600 horse Peterbilt pulling 100,000 lbs.+ around....that's heat rippling out of those pipes folks....4 dollars plus a gallon blowing out....warming things up.....hmmmmmmm

What do you do with the particulate scrubbed out of the gases ????

Yeah, but I think you'll find it referred to jerking the counterweighted fill spout down to fill the tender from the trackside water tanks that were so common at small towns in the steam train days.

Matt, my understanding of coal gas was that it was a benzene compound that was refined to fuel grade gasoline. Many present day coal fires electric plants would also be enviromental sites because of buried "fly ash" which is now being used as a substitute for cement and letting the roads go to h3ll.

Dave, see my comment to Matt about present coal fired generating plants. I'm trying to learn, but I thought natural gas and benzene were part of the higher quality by products. Isn't natural gas part of the Haber process of making anhydrous ammonia? I also agree that scrubbers give products that can be used with additional processing instead of blowing them into the air. So couldn't scrubbers be employed with gasification plants? Isn't one of the rules of physics; Matter can neither be created or destroyed. So let's change what we have into something we can use.

MMF, somehow that sounds a bit dirty :^). Cement making also uses powdered coal and natural gas in their process to create high enough heat to "liquify" limestone and produce "klinkers" that are then crushed into cement.

If you'll do a search, you'll find that powdered coal has been used as a fuel for diesel engines.

Steam locomotives took an awful lot of manhours to keep running. They couldn't be multiple coupled and run by one crew. And the working conditions were terrible.

The life stories of Alexander Winton and Charles Kettering and their efforts to develop diesel engines are inspiring, even if you loved steam engines.

I was talking about the "Coal Gas" or "City Gas" that was piped to homes for lighting & stoves.

It was CO, which is where the idea of sticking your head in the stove to commit suicide comes from.

I know there was "tar" and other stuff like benzene that came out of the plants as by-products; I just don't know what was really going on inside them.

http://www.fischer-tropsch.org/

Good resource if you're interested in some references. Sponsored by Dr. Anthony Stranges. Had him for a prof years ago. I wrote a paper on how WWII accelerated technology in so many areas. Didn't know at the time he was one of the world's experts on how the Germans converted coal into fuel for the war machines...but he was gracious in grading my paper none the less.

Just in the news that the military will start using it for jet fuel.

Diesel trains are quite efficient, much more efficient than transport trucks.

Train steam engines are very inefficient, to have a steam engine as efficient as a power plant would require towing a powerplant behind the steam engine.

Coal can be very dirty, you can't tell just looking at the stack. A baghouse or precipitator catches particulates, they get sent back to burn again usually but sometimes not depending on the coal source.

A scrubber helps a lot to clean up the stack, but there is a lot of limestone hauled in and gypsum hauled out to keep a scrubber going.

Diesel trucks have some room for improvement but all that heat going up the stack is low grade heat. You could make some low grade wet steam and maybe get 10 hp out of it, but you'd be dragging another 2000 lb of equipment.

Now a stationary diesel, it makes a lot of sense to recapture that heat. And a lot of places do, use the heat for a steam cycle or district heating, or in some places, to run an ammonia A/C cycle.

The gasification plant in N.D. was built with the most modern scrubbers at that time. But now I think they have to upgrade them somehow.

Liquefaction - Coal-To-Liquids (CTL)
Coals can also be converted into liquid fuels like gasoline or diesel by several different processes. The Fischer-Tropsch process of indirect synthesis of liquid hydrocarbons was used in Nazi Germany for many years and is today used by Sasol in South Africa. Coal would be gasified to make syngas (a balanced purified mixture of CO and H2 gas) and the syngas condensed using Fischer-Tropsch catalysts to make light hydrocarbons which are further processed into gasoline and diesel. Syngas can also be converted to methanol, which can be used as a fuel, fuel additive, or further processed into gasoline via the Mobil M-gas process.

A direct liquefaction process Bergius process [8] (liquefaction by hydrogenation) is also available but has not been used outside Germany, where such processes were operated both during World War I and World War II. SASOL in South Africa has experimented with direct hydrogenation. Several other direct liquefaction processes have been developed, among these being the SRC-I and SRC-II (Solvent Refined Coal) processes developed by Gulf Oil and implemented as pilot plants in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.[9]

Another direct hydrogenation process was explored by the NUS Corporation in 1976 and patented by Wilburn C. Schroeder. The process involved dried, pulverized coal mixed with roughly 1wt% molybdenum catalysts. Hydrogenation occurred by use of high temperature and pressure synthesis gas produced in a separate gasifier. The process ultimately yielded a synthetic crude product, Naphtha, a limited amount of C3/C4 gas, light-medium weight liquids (C5-C10) suitable for use as fuels, small amounts of NH3 and significant amounts of CO2.[10]

Yet another process to manufacture liquid hydrocarbons from coal is low temperature carbonization (LTC). Coal is coked at temperatures between 450 and 700°C compared to 800 to 1000°C for metallurgical coke. These temperatures optimize the production of coal tars richer in lighter hydrocarbons than normal coal tar. The coal tar is then further processed into fuels. The Karrick process was developed by Lewis C. Karrick, an oil shale technologist at the U.S. Bureau of Mines in the 1920s.

All of these liquid fuel production methods release carbon dioxide (CO2) in the conversion process, far more than is released in the extraction and refinement of liquid fuel production from petroleum. If these methods were adopted to replace declining petroleum supplies, carbon dioxide emissions would be greatly increased on a global scale. For future liquefaction projects, Carbon dioxide sequestration is proposed to avoid releasing it into the atmosphere, though no pilot projects have confirmed the feasibility of this approach on a wide scale. As CO2 is one of the process streams, sequestration is easier than from flue gases produced in combustion of coal with air, where CO2 is diluted by nitrogen and other gases. Sequestration will, however, add to the cost.

The reaction of coal and water using high temperature heat from a nuclear reactor offers promise of liquid transport fuels that could prove carbon-neutral compared to petroleum use. The development of a reliable nuclear reactor that could provide 900 to 1000 deg C process heat, such as the pebble bed reactor, would be necessary.

Coal liquefaction is one of the backstop technologies that could potentially limit escalation of oil prices and mitigate the effects of transportation energy shortage that some authors have suggested could occur under peak oil. This is contingent on liquefaction production capacity becoming large enough to satiate the very large and growing demand for petroleum. Estimates of the cost of producing liquid fuels from coal suggest that domestic U.S. production of fuel from coal becomes cost-competitive with oil priced at around 35 USD per barrel,[11] (break-even cost). This price, while above historical averages, is well below current oil prices. This makes coal a viable financial alternative to oil for the time being, although current production is small.[12]

Among commercially mature technologies, advantage for indirect coal liquefaction over direct coal liquefaction are reported by Williams and Larson (2003). Estimates are reported for sites in China where break-even cost for coal liquefaction may be in the range between 25 to 35 USD/barrel of oil.[citation needed]"

Intensive research and project developments have been implemented from 2001. The World CTL Award is granted to personalities having brought eminent contribution to the understanding and development of Coal liquefaction. The 2008 presentation ceremony took place at the World CTL 2008 Conference (3 & 4 April, 2008).

Thank you for the comprehensive answer. It certain seems like there are viable methods to do the conversion. Now a further poser; Who now owns the mineral rights? Many of the mines in my area were owned by railroads, some of whom are bankrupt, abandon, etc. Some of our deeds exclude mineral rights in favor of the Minneapolis and St. Paul RR ( bankrupt in 1930) and no further records of transfer, do you think that now I'm the owner?