The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand

There has been a fair amount of discussion about the need to form liquid fuels from coal. As the more conventional liquid fuels get more expensive, and less easy to find and produce, an alternative source of fuel has been suggested in the Fischer Tropsch conversion of coal into diesel and gasoline. Can I ask why?

No, not in the sense of do we need the fuel, but rather why go through this long, complex and relatively inefficient process of making the liquid, when, for just the price of grinding it down to micron size, you can mix the coal with water and happily drive your vehicle away. “Preposterous !” I can almost hear the splutters from here, but no, actually it is not, and I thought I would revisit a program that General Electric and others carried out in collaboration with the Department of Energy, between 1982 and 1993, which explains what some of the problems were and how they were resolved.