Energy Citations Database (ECD) - - Document #5410456
Herein is even further documentation that, not only does our US Government know that Coal can be converted, on a practical basis, into Methane, which has quite valuable uses that we'll again repeat following the excerpt, but, it has known about, and was refining, such valuable technology at least until the late 1980's - when most of the other Federally-sponsored Coal research and development programs, as we've documented, seem to have "winked out", as well.
The excerpt:
"Title: Engineering support services for the DOE/GRI (Department of Energy/Gas Research Institute) coal-gasification research program. Topical report: evaluation of the CNG acid gas removal process. Volume 2. Report for January-May 1986
Author: Fu, R.K.; Zahnstecher, L.W.
Date: December 1986
Report Numbers: PB-88-163811/XAB; FW-21-3035-T3; OSTI ID: 5410456
Resource: Technical Report
Other Information: Previously announced as PB--87-158903. See also Volume 1, PB--88-163803 and Volume 3, PB--88-163829
(Where are the other Volumes? We couldn't, haven't yet been able to, track them down.)
Research Organization: Foster Wheeler USA Corp., Livingston, NJ
Abstract: As part of the technical support services for the DOE/GRI Joint Coal Gasification Research Program, Foster Wheeler conducted an evaluation of the low-temperature acid-gas removal process under development by CNG Research Company. Volume 2 of the report summarizes the case study in which the CNG process is applied to treating a raw syngas stream derived from ash-agglomerating fluidized-bed gasification of Wyodak subbituminous coal. Two other case studies of the CNG process, considered treatment of raw syngas from Lurgi fixed-bed gasification of lignite after Direct Methanation and raw syngas from ash-agglomerating fluidized-bed gasification of Wyodak subbituminous coal after Direct Methanation."
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This technical progress report is 144 pages long. Our take on it, and it's missing "Volume"s, is that it would tell us more fully what we should already have known from Oil Industry developments we reported to you dating back into the 1950's: We can make Methane from Coal.
And, as we have and will continue to document: Once we have Methane, made from either Coal Gasification technology, as herein, or from the Sabatier-type, and related, recycling of Carbon Dioxide, as being currently employed by NASA aboard the ISS, we can either convert that Methane directly into liquid fuels, such as Methanol, or use the Methane to recycle more Carbon Dioxide into higher hydrocarbons, as in "Tri-reforming" technologies such as that explained most thoroughly by Penn State University; and, to a lesser extent, as we've also documented, by West Virginia University.
The potentials for establishing a sustainable liquid fuel economy based on Coal, and on the by-products of Coal use, seem, to us, vast. Why the technologies for fulfilling those potentials aren't being openly discussed, developed and pursued, especially in US Coal Country, is, to us, something of a vast mystery.
