Patent US3184401
Continuing our upward chronological trek through the Coal conversion and liquefaction technologies developed by Pittsburgh's Consolidation Coal Company, we submit this relatively ancient US Patent, from a year in which some of us geezers were just freshmen in high school.
Comment follows excerpts from Everett Gorin's process for cleaning up and purifying liquid hydrocarbons produced from Coal:
"United States Patent 3,184,401 - Hydrogen-Enriched Products from Coal
Date: May, 1965
Inventor: Everett Gorin
Assignee: Consolidation Coal Company, Pittsburgh
Abstract: This invention relates to an improved process for producing hydrogen-enriched hydrocarbonaceous products from coal.
More particularly, this invention relates to a process for removing ash, i.e., metallic contaminants and the like, from ash-containing coal extract prior to catalytic hydrogenation thereof.
As described in my (various other US Patents) valuable liquid products such as gasoline may be derived from coal ... .
The extract obtained by the solvent extraction of coal ... contains a minute, but economically prohibitive amount of ... ash.
(Gorin catalogues other methods - quite surprising that there were, by 1965, so many of them - which had been developed and patented for removing ash from raw Coal liquids that were intended to be refined into liquid hydrocarbon fuels.)
Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to provide a novel and economic process for producing hydrogen enriched hydrocarbonaceous products from coal ... which process is free from the aforementioned disadvantages.
It is another object of this invention to provide a novel process for deashing coal extract.
Hydrogen-transferring hydrocarbonaceous liquids: Suitable hydrogen-transferring hydrocarbonaceous liquids are ... polycyclic hydrocarbon mixtures ... preferably derived from the intermediate or final steps of the process of this invention.
Partially hydrogenated polycyclic hydrocarbons are the most active and preferred type of hydrogen transfer liquids. Examples ... include anthracene and phenanthrene."
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Two things worthy of note are going on in Gorin's patent.
First, Consol developed a better and cheaper way to clean up Coal liquids and make them ready for easier refining into "valuable liquid products such as gasoline".
Second, they validate even further one of our much-documented facts:
Primary and long-known Coal oils, such as "anthracene and phenanthrene", which we've made from Coal for much more than a century, can themselves be hydrogenated, and then made to serve as agents of hydrogenation and liquefaction for more raw Coal. They are, in fact, "the most active and preferred type of hydrogen transfer liquids".
In any case, herein is yet more evidence that, not only have we known how to make the liquid hydrocarbons our domestic US economy needs out of our abundant domestic Coal for quite a long time, we also long ago developed sophisticated and economical means of processing Coal liquids, to make them even better and more competitive with petroleum-based hydrocarbons.
Coal liquids have been able to compete with petroleum, as herein, for nearly half a century.
