This would be a significant advance for many European
coal-producing nations as well.
>From today's "NASA Tech Briefs Insider:"
CONVERTING COAL
A research team at Rutgers University, in collaboration with
researchers at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has developed a way
to convert
carbon sources, such as coal, to diesel fuel. This important advance
could
significantly cut America's dependence on foreign oil. 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.
The researchers 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 chemical pair 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.
For more information, visit: http://link.abpi.net/l.php?20060420A2
David Breneman david_breneman@yahoo.com
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