USDOE Coal + Steam = Hydrogenated Syngas

  
We have continued to assert, in our reports, that our own US Government, through issuance of patents for technologies that convert Coal into hydrocarbon fuels, indirectly admits of the fact that it knows full well the true potentials for utilizing Coal to supply our need for the fuels we now lavishly support unpleasant OPEC regimes, and devastate our own economy and our coastlines and our oceans, for the supply of.
 
Our feelings behind that assertion, that our Government is thus sitting on it's thumbs, or doing worse with them, while we take unpleasant economic and environmental beatings, is compounded when we discover that, not only does our Government acknowledge the fact that Coal can be converted into hydrocarbon fuels, it even owns the rights to an as-yet unused process for doing so.  

Germany-New Jersey 1932 CoalTL

 
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.

Standard Oil 1952 CO2 + CH4 + H2O = Syngas

 
Herein, we submit even more evidence, and more is to follow in coming days, that the Oil Industry, and our own United States Government, have known for a very long time - at least, as herein, half a century - that Carbon Dioxide is a valuable raw material resource which we can utilize in the synthesis of higher hydrocarbons.
 
We have reported on tri-reforming technologies seemingly developed only in recent years by Penn State University, and others, wherein Carbon Dioxide can be reacted with Methane, and in some cases with Steam as well, in order to generate more complex hydrocarbons suitable for use in manufacturing liquid fuels.

Texaco 1958 Coal Hydrogasification

  
We have lately been documenting the fact that primarily carbonaceous feed stocks - Coal, specifically - can be "hydrogenated" through the simple addition of Steam, in various processes designed to synthesize Hydrocarbons as replacements for those liquid and gaseous fuels we now derive from Petroleum.

ARCO CO2 to Methanol Photosynthesis

  
Seriously, if you have any remaining doubts, subsequent to our dispatches concerning the reality of Carbon Dioxide recycling technology that can synthesize higher hydrocarbons, about why Big Oil is so keen on us Coal Country rubes being compelled, all at our and our Coal-use industries' expense, to collect and ship all of our CO2 to places like West Texas for leaky geologic sequestration, herein is another smoking gun that should dispel those doubts.
 
Like the USDOE research and development at the Sandia and Los Alamos US National Laboratories we've reported, we see herein that Big Oil has devised his own methods for harnessing freely-available environmental energy in a way that would enable him to convert all the Carbon Dioxide we give him into valuable products, such as the liquid fuel, Methanol.