We stumbled across this, yet another pre-WWII Coal liquefaction artifact, in the course of our research, and wanted to share it with you to demonstrate that there was nothing secretive, at all, in the development, by Germany and Japan, of technologies that eventually powered the Axis armies with liquid fuels made from Coal.
Not only did our US Government openly, as herein, publish information on the evolving technologies for converting Coal into liquid hydrocarbon fuels, our US petroleum industry actually helped to develop, and came to own some of, those technologies.
Comment follows excerpts from the enclosed link to, and attached file of:
"United States Patent 1,890,434 - Conversion of Solid Fuels into Valuable Liquids
Date: December, 1932
Inventor: Carl Krauch, et. al., Germany
Assignee: Standard - I.G. Company, New Jersey
Abstract: One of the most important and widely agitated problems in the industrial world has for a long time been how to produce good gasoline or other valuable liquid fuels from solid fuel including coal ... .
By the process herein described we claim to ... produce good pure liquid fuels ... from solid fuels ... by a process economical in material, time, labor and wear on apparatus.
Compounds obtained ... are generally very low in sulfur ... and are excellently suitable for use as fuel for internal combustion engines."
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Our brief excerpts do little justice to the very-lengthy full Description and Claims.
We confess that the process described by Krauch, et. al., does, seemingly, require the use of free Hydrogen; which, as we've documented, can be obtained via several reasonably economical processes; and which is, in any case, widely used today by the conventional petroleum refining industry.
But, one note of interest is that the invention specifies that other suitable "solid fuel", in addition to Coal, can be used in the process, and such other fuel includes, specifically, Carbon-recycling and renewable "wood".
In any case, we have known, as herein, that we can make liquid fuels "low in sulfur ... and ... excellently suitable for use as fuel for internal combustion engines" out of "solid fuel including coal", in way that our US Government, as embodied in the Patent Office, affirmed to be "economical in material, time, labor and wear on apparatus", since 1932.