We have thoroughly documented that Germany and Japan both developed coal-to-liquid fuel technologies, and used them extensively during WWII, establishing multiple coal conversion factories in Germany, Japan and the Axis-occupied Far East to supply their military machines with liquid fuels synthesized from coal.
What isn't so well known is that the United States, after WWII, used, as we've documented, captured German technology to establish several domestic coal-to-liquid conversion factories in the continental US.
Needless to say, those enterprises weren't allowed to operate for very long, and didn't receive much press.
Perhaps even less known is that our staunch allies, the British, were making their own gasoline, from their own domestic coal: before, during and after WWII.
An excerpt from the enclosed link:
"Although the technology of coal hydrogenation was taken to many countries, it never became a global enterprise. By the early 1920s the key patents were controlled by I. G. Farben in Germany, but a decade later the international rights were controlled jointly by I. G. Farben, the American oil company Standard Oil, the Anglo-Dutch oil company Royal Dutch Shell, and the British chemical combine Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). ICI first built a plant in Billingham, England, where it produced gasoline from 1935 to 1958, and added a second one at Heysham in Lancashire during the war. On its defeat Germany was banned from hydrogenating coal; in 1949 its unused plants were ordered to be dismantled. The Soviet Union took four of these plants to Siberia. In Soviet-controlled East Germany, isolated from Western oil markets, coal continued to be hydrogenated until the 1960s. Spain meanwhile developed a synthetic fuel program at Puertollano following a 1944 deal between the pro-Axis Spanish government and Germany. In 1950 Spain’s government signed new deals for technology with BASF and others; production started in 1956 and lasted until 1966."
Add Spain to the list of people who know it can be done, too, we guess.
And, note that, ominously to us, the coal conversion patents were once "controlled" by "the American oil company Standard Oil", among others.
How come we haven't figured all of this out yet in Coal Country? How come nobody's told us?
About time someone did tell us, isn't it?