http://ur.rutgers.edu/medrel/science/coal.shtml
Professor Alan Goldman and his Rutgers team in collaboration with
researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have
developed a way to convert carbon sources, such as coal, to diesel
fuel.
This important advance could significantly cut Americas dependence
on foreign oil what President Bush called an addiction in his
2006 State of the Union address. According to the U.S. Department
of Energy, our 286 billion tons of coal in the ground translate
into energy reserves 40 times those of oil. Diesel engines provide
the power to move 94 percent of all freight in the U.S. and 95
percent of all transit buses and heavy construction machinery,
consuming approximately 56 billion gallons of diesel fuel per
year.
Goldman explained that the breakthrough technology employs a pair
of catalytic chemical reactions that operate in tandem, one of
which captured the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. This dynamic
chemical duo revamps the Fischer-Tropsch (FT) process for
generating synthetic petroleum substitutes, invented in 1920 but
never developed to the point of becoming commercially viable for
coal conversion.
I study catalysts, the little molecular machines that control
chemical reactions. With our new catalysts, one can generate
productive, clean burning fuels economically and at unsurpassed
levels of efficiency using Fischer-Tropsch, said Goldman, a
professor in the department of chemistry and chemical biology at
Rutgers.
The work grew out of a National Science Foundation-funded research
consortium, the Center for the Activation and Transformation of
Strong Bonds, based at the University of Washington.
Fischer-Tropsch yields a wide distribution of molecular weight
hydrocarbon products but without any way to control the desired
mix. The low-weight and the high-weight Fischer-Tropsch products
are useful the light as gas and the medium-heavy as diesel fuel,
Goldman explained.
The problem the greatest inefficiency of the process is that
you also wind up with a substantial quantity of medium-weight
products that are not useful and you are stuck with them, Goldman
said. What we are now able to do with our new catalysts is
something no one else has done before. We take all these
undesirable medium-weight substances and convert them to the useful
higher- and lower-weight products.
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While it can help US, it can also help us, at least before dog poop
becomes usable. We are too reliant on diesel, and hopefully this
can solve our reliance on diesel. But if coal is gone, something to
have to produce coal..................