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Wednesday, May 20, 2009

It's all about coal


Details are strangely sketchy, but an American company claims it has found a way to extract a barrel of oil from each ton of coal.

If this technology proved effective, the winners would be the big coal producers: the United States, Russia, China, India and Australia. Left right out would be traditional oil producers of the middle east.

Australia, for example, imports about 125 million barrels of oil each year, but mines 260 million tonnes of coal - so if this technology was viable, Australia could become a net oil exporter.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Coal to oil has been around for many decades. It was heavily used by the Germans in WWII and has been used on a massive scale in South Africa. The only difference I can see here is a claimed better method for removing impurities.

In Victoria there is tremendous potential for solving our reliance on foreign oil by using a coal liquefaction process. It has already been tested and proved at Demonstration Plant scale. All we need is a guaranteed oil price of about $60 or above, and the will to build it. The latter will be a problem.

Infidel Tiger said...

Big solar will see to it that this never sees the light of day.

Minicapt said...

That, and the offer of a "3-pager" to explain the process led to a "404" page. This persuades me less that the offer of a "HHO" generator for the family steed.

Cheers

Margo's Maid said...

Blind link? Sounds to me exactly what IT was talking about.