OIL FROM COAL

Taranaki Daily News, 1 February 1927, Page 9

OIL FROM COAL

RESEARCH IN BRITAIN. COMMERCIAL METHOD FOUND. (By Archibald Hurd.) One of the most significant acts of the Empire Marketing Board, which is already at work in the British Isles advertising Empire products on hoardings as well as in the newspapers, has been the allocation of funds to the committee of the Privy Council which, under the presidency of the Earl of Balfour, promotes and encourages scientific and industrial research. The Empire Marketing Board is utilising the administrative services of this body, which extends throughout the whole Empire, rather than set up an organisation of its own. In this way overlapping and waste of effort and money will be avoided. The board has decided that the future of practically every industry in the Empire det pends on the extent to which advantage is . taken of scientific developments, and, as I one of its first acts, it has decided to set F aside for research work a considerable part of the annual grant of £1,000,000 voted by the British Parliament. While attention is being turned to the problems associated with the production and preservation of foods, the board ig not ignoring the importance of cheap fuel for industry, as well as for transport on land, by sea, and in the air. Lord Balfour’s organisation has offered to Cambridge University, on behalf of the Marketing. Board, a sum "not exceeding £25,000,” to i enable it to extend and improve the ’ equipment of the research station, which, in association with nearly a score of other . centres, is investigating the problem of the carbonisation of coal under low temperature. VAST DEPOSITS OF COAL. This is a significant decision. It is recognised that of all reasearch problems this is one of the most fundamental from the point of view of the Empire as a whole, seeing that there are deposits of coal, of varying quality, in so many parts of the Empire, and notably in South Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India. How are these deposits to be utilised to the best advantage? What, again, is to be done with the shale, which is to be found in incalculable quantities as far north in the British Isles as Scotland and as far south as Lyme Regis? It has hitherto proved of little or no value. Until recently, moreover, there has been little demand for anthracite, at the other end of the scale. Between these two exl tremes there is the brown coal of low I carbon content, which has been a drug on the market, and many other sorts of coal. In varying, degree, all parts of the Empire are confronted with the problem of utilising to the best advantage the enormous resources of power which have lain buried in lhe earth for many centuries. Scientists now declare that all the shale and coal in the Empire can be converted into oil; they have already proved, in scores of laboratories, that this is scientifically practicable. There are about a dozen processes in the field. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research is engaged in submitting each one to rigorous tests in the confident anticipation that one or other of them will prove economically feasible. The essential problem is not to extract oil from coal, for that has already been done on a considerable scale, but to obtain the oil at a cost which, in association with the value of the other by-products, such as coke, tar, and sulphate of ammonia, wil enable it to be sold as cheaply as the oil which is now obtained from wells in the United States, Persia, Burmah, and other parts of the world. A GERMAN INVENTOR’S SUCCESS. The Germans had been working at this i problem for many years before the Great L War, and the readjustment of the Franco 1 German frontiers after the war, which de ■ prived them of some of their best coal- ■ 'fields, has led them to redouble their r efforts to find other source* of fuel supply.

They have already opened up, at a great expenditure of capital, numerous pits all over Germany for the recovery of brown coal. This fuel is of poor quality, but it was reabsed when this work was begun that, if oil could be produced from it, sure foundations would have been laid for the industrial future of the German people. Dr. Bergius, of Heidelburg, claimed some time ago that he had solved the problem of converting this brown coal into oil by a method of hydrogenisation, and that claim is now conceded. He first reduces the coal to a powder, mixes it with oil, and then submits it to the action of hydrogen, under pressure, at a temperature of 400 degrees centigrade. In this way he obtains gas, ammonia, coke and other byproducts, and, most important, oil, about one-third of which is suitable for use as motor spirit. Retorts of this design are now being erected in Germany and elsewhere and the right to work the patent has already been "leased” in several countries, including the United States. British scientists who have studied the process are satisfied that the hydrogenisation of brown coal is a practicable and economic undertaking. One of them remarked in conversation with me recently that he be lieved that Germany in a few years would be entirely independent of outside sources of oil supply, and would be able, by utilising her deposits of brown coal, to meet all her own requirements—running the machinery in her factories and workshops, and providing for her railway locomotives and ships of commerce, and war, as well as motor-cars —without being dependent on foreign supplies.