FUEL FROM THE AIR

Greymouth Evening Star, 15 November 1930, Page 11

FUEL FROM THE AIR

COAL AGE PASSING?

Dr. Herbert Levinstein, the eminent chemist, in his presidential address to the Society of Chemical Industry at Birmingham, suggested that the air might in future supply synthetic fuel. Having tapped the inexhaustible supplies of atmospheric nitrogen, he said, the next step \vas to transform another constituent of the air, carbolic acid, the intervention of the plant,’ and thus to get, without the interval of a geological age, the raw materials now obtained from coal. The complete reduction of carbonic acid to methane (coal gas) had, in fact, been accomplished. It would certainly not be long before methane became a valuable raw material of the chemical industry. It could, in turn, be almost completely converted in the arc oven into acetylene, and acetylene could be polymerised to a tar, about half of which consisted of benzine.

Thus they obtained, by the synthetic, instead of the geological route, direct access to a new source of the products obtained from coal tar. Our available raw material thus became inexhaustible, for carbonic acid existed in balanced quantities in the atmosphere. If time was money, what was the money value of this reaction in terms of time? Britain’s weakness as a manufacturing country was its dependence on coal for power, instead of on the tides, the waterfalls, the wind, the direct radiation of the sun. Other countries were developing the use of water power for industries on a scale that seemed stupendous compared with the small scale still predominant in this country. Another ten or fifteen generations would see the exhaustion of the world’s principal coal deposits. The age of coal was passing. It would have lasted when it was over for a less period than the Moorish occupation of Spain, which at tho, time seemed so important to Christendom and vanished leaving behind it nothing but a garden here and there, a palace or two’ preserved by the conqueror’s pride, and a few romantic tales. The losses of the Napoleonic wars were soon made good by the development of steam and coal. The losses of the last'war could be made good by learning to use more effectually the natural forces for industrial work. “This,” said Dr. Levinstein, “is precisely the long-rang research which the Government can do and ought to do and does not do. It is costly, but necessary.” The business of this country, as seen by the Victorian or so-called “Manchester* School” of Economics, was to import raw material and food and to export manufacturers. That was why they neglected agriculture. This pre-supposed a choice of people abroad willing to take up our manufactures at “good” prices, and a choice of people willing to supply us with food and raw materials at “cheap” prices. Our business, we were told, was to choose the cheapest supplier and sell to the highest bidder. It was the principle of the cheap-jack who moved on from fair to fair. It was not the maxim for permanent 1 business.

We should, in the absence of international cartels, always have to sell in competition with people ■who also had a surplus to sell. “Big business,” Dr. Levinstein decleared, “must and does look ahead, but our biggest business—Britain's business —does not look ahead, * It is difficult to get its managers to take the long range view. It may be more difficult for us later on, when food and timber are scarcer, to make such an arrangement. Now would appear to be the tiipe to act.”