Production of hydrogenated hydrocarbons - Patent 4162959
Yet another oil company, Occidental Petroleum, "OXY", hopped onto what seems to have been the Coal conversion bandwagon three decades ago.
Herein, they are seen as having been awarded a US Patent for, seemingly, a version of what we have earlier documented as Shell Oil's Middle Distillate System, most often abbreviated as "MDS" and which is now in the process of being, for the conversion of both natural gas and Coal-derived synthesis gas into liquid fuels, reduced to commercial practice in a few places around the world, including, as we've reported, Bahrain and Malaysia.
Some excerpts:
"Production of hydrogenated hydrocarbons - United States Patent 4162959
Inventors: Duraiswamy, Kandaswamy (Laverne, CA)
Date: July 31, 1979
Assignee: Occidental Petroleum Corporation (Los Angeles, CA)
Information Bridge: DOE Scientific and Technical Information - Sponsored by OSTI
The link above, and the one imbedded just below, and attached as a document file, should take you to one quarterly report of a research project sponsored by our US Department of Energy, and undertaken for the DOE by Consol, and Consol's subcontractor, the University of Kentucky.
Consol and UK were developing, for the DOE, a "Novel Coal Liquefaction Concept".
This is just a progress report, made in November, 1998, for a quarter's worth of work completed in September of 1998. Yet, the entire contract was only supposed to run through August of 1998, after having started in May of 1995. So, if we read it all correctly, this should have been something of a final, or the final quarter's report. Yet, more work, further development, is stated to be planned.
And, no, we have not yet been able to track down the full, final report; if there is one.
If you have followed our dispatches, you will recognize the names of some of the individual researchers involved from our reports on their other, independent, efforts into the development of coal liquefaction technologies.
We have several times documented for you the Union Carbide Corporation Coal conversion factory that operated for a time, just outside of Charleston, WV, some decades ago.
Herein, we present a US Patent owned by Union Carbide, now a part of Dow Chemical, for a process of Coal conversion that was invented and developed by four of Carbide's West Virginia experts in the technology.
Some excerpts from the enclosed link, as follows:
"Integrated coal hydrocarbonization and gasification of char
United States Patent 3988237
Date: October 26, 1976
Inventors: Davis, Hubert Greenidge; Albright, Charles William; et. al. (St. Albans, WV and Charleston, WV)
In this United States Patent, enclosed as a link and attached, we further confirm that Standard Oil developed technologies that would enable the conversion of our domestic coal resources into more versatile, but increasingly scarce, forms.
Although we have already documented Standard's patenting of technologies to convert Methane to liquid fuels, as in our reports on both US Patent 4704496, a "Process for Converting Light Hydrocarbon to More Readily Transportable Materials"; and, US Patent 4727207, "Process for converting methane and/or natural gas to more readily transportable materials", we herein document that they have developed the technology to synthesize the Methane, that would be employed in those patented processes to synthesize liquid fuels, from both Coal and Carbon Dioxide.
Linked above and attached, you can access:
"US Patent 2,694,623: Process for the Enrichment of Water Gas
Date: November 16, 1954 (Note: As revealed via the link, the application was filed in 1949.)
Inventors: Albert Welty and Sumner Sweetser
Assignee: Standard Oil Development Co.
Although we have documented that liquid fuels synthesized from Coal can be made to be nearly Sulfur-free, with the extracted Sulfur available as a commercial by-product, it turns out that the inherent Sulfur content in some Coal can, actually, also be utilized to improve the process of Coal liquefaction.
So valuable is that surprising bit of information, doubly surprising since we doubt that nearly anyone in US Coal Country had any idea that Coal Liquefaction science had reached these levels of development and sophistication, it has been patented, by, unsurprisingly now, Exxon.
Brief comment follows excerpts from:
Coal liquefaction process - United States Patent 4094765
A coal liquefaction chargestock is first treated with a hydrogen sulfide-containing gas and thereafter subjected to coal liquefaction conditions.
Date: 06/13/1978
Inventors: Bearden Jr., Roby, Aldridge, Clyde L.