I've heard there have been advances in converting coal into gasoline, but I'd thought the Germans tried this in WW2 with limited success. Could this help our gas-crunch considering how much coal there is on the planet?
Gas from Coal
- Thread starter lonely guy
- Start date
It's probably not a wise move to replace one limited resource with another. Better to reduce consumption.
Clean Coal
There are a lot of people betting on "clean coal" tecnnology. The Chinese, of course, don't care much about clean fuel. Their air quality is terrible. Canada was and probably still is selling them lots of coal.
Coal is still very abundant and there's lots of it that is very accessible.
I think the Germans had little converters that they attached to existing vehicles. I think that while the cars ran, their usability was severely impaired in terms of speed and power. In other words they ran but only sort of.
The Ontario government was promising to get rid of coal-fired power stations.
We are going to see a lot more nuclear energy in the future.
There are a lot of people betting on "clean coal" tecnnology. The Chinese, of course, don't care much about clean fuel. Their air quality is terrible. Canada was and probably still is selling them lots of coal.
Coal is still very abundant and there's lots of it that is very accessible.
I think the Germans had little converters that they attached to existing vehicles. I think that while the cars ran, their usability was severely impaired in terms of speed and power. In other words they ran but only sort of.
The Ontario government was promising to get rid of coal-fired power stations.
We are going to see a lot more nuclear energy in the future.
Ethanol
The best thing to do is replace gasoline with a cleaner fuel such as Ethanol http://www.eere.energy.gov/afdc/altfuel/eth_made.html
The best thing to do is replace gasoline with a cleaner fuel such as Ethanol http://www.eere.energy.gov/afdc/altfuel/eth_made.html
lonely guy said:
The Fischer-Tropsch process works reasonably well, and was used by both Nazi Germany and apartheid-era South Africa when they couldn't get their grubby little paws on crude oil. However, as others have pointed out, we would be trading one finite resource for another finite resource, all the while dumping more CO2 into the atmosphere. Probably not an ideal solution...
ducttape said:
The technology is indeed well developed. The famous Leuna Werke (established 1916) supplied Nazi Germany with gasoline, and the process is still used today in South Africa, where there are large deposits of coal. South Africa is the only country in the world to use the process today. The company that produces the synthetic fuel is called Sasol.
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