Coal Gasification Archive Goes Online
24 August 2006
A Texas A&M University history professor and Syntroleum Corporation, owner of a compact Fischer-Tropsch fuels technology, are posting nearly a quarter of a million pages of coal gasification research conducted from the 1920s through 1980s on the Internet.
Professor Anthony Stranges, who holds degrees in chemistry and a doctorate in history, was part of a team of historians, chemists and engineers formed at the university in the 1970s to assemble and analyze hundreds of thousands of pages of German gasification documents captured after World War II.
The Germans used gasification as a major energy source to support their WW II operations. What they learned then was thought to have some practical applications during the acute oil shortages of the 1970s, especially since the German coal used in the process is chemically quite similar to that found in parts of the United States. Gasification interest, however, dwindled when oil supplies and prices stabilized.
With rising prices and the prospect of energy instability, gasification is back on the table. Stranges and Syntroleum sought to make the early research documents widely available as a public service for future studies.
The gasification research documents can be accessed at the Fischer-Tropsch Archive where Syntroleum will be posting more than 230,000 pages of this research over the next several months. These documents reflect commercialization of work done by the US Energy Research and Development Administration and the US Department of Energy in the 1970s and 1980s.
Syntroleum acquired the research documents from the US National Technical Information Service and over the last three months has converted them from microfiche to the proper format for Web posting. Texas A&M also has done a significant amount of gasification research that Stranges is converting for the Fischer-Tropsch (F-T) Web site.
The F-T Archive site was created a few years ago and is sponsored in cooperation with Texas A&M and Syntroleum Corporation, which owns a proprietary process for producing synthetic liquid hydrocarbons from natural gas or gas synthesized from coal and other carbon-based feedstock.
The US Air Force is running a flight test next month using Syntroleum GTL fuel in a B-52.
I recall reading somewhere that it was an American corporation that brought the F-T CTL technology to Germany to support their war machine, much like IBM's active involvement in the camps. I guess corporations don't really care what side they deal with, business is business. Good to see research being put in the public domain.
Posted by: Erick | 24 August 2006 at 02:01 AM
dream on.
Posted by: hans wurst | 24 August 2006 at 09:49 AM
Erick,
http://www.john-loftus.com/Thyssen.asp
http://www.john-loftus.com/bushnazi_1951.asp
http://www.john-loftus.com/interview_bushnazi.asp
http://www.john-loftus.com/bush_nazi_link.asp
_Disturbing.
_
___The silver lining to F-T is that the Syngas process is similar, and it may be possible to turn a CTL process into a BTL process in the future.
Posted by: allen Z | 24 August 2006 at 10:45 AM
jetBlue is pushing syngas
http://www.prosefights.org/coal/coal.htm#jetblue
Posted by: bill payne | 25 August 2006 at 11:13 AM
Really great work from Texas A&M Univ and Syntroleum Corp. Appreciate their efforts and very glad that they have loaded lots of information in the public domain.
Posted by: Srinivas | 27 April 2007 at 12:39 PM
Delighted that some of the coal development history is being archived.Many of the "pioneers" of the recent decades who carried out the research are now fast disapperaring.I tried to get the "Lowry" standard coal technology referance updated but did not get much interest at DOE. Sy Alpert
Posted by: Sy Alpert | 15 June 2007 at 08:32 PM