Petrol from coal
a chemical technique that Germany used in World War ii may now help break the spiral of ever-rising oil prices. A team of German scientists has perfected the technology of transforming coal into liquid transportation fuels such as diesel and petrol.
Since the 1940s, chemical engineers have been using iron oxide-based catalysts to break coal's extended network of chemical bonds into smaller hydrocarbon molecules, which can serve as precursors for liquid fuels. But these catalysts work well only with the relatively young, so-called "low-rank' coals that are highly porous, allowing the chemicals to freely percolate. The porosity in coal owes to the presence of impurities; in low-rank coals the impurites may be as high as 40 per cent.
The older, high-rank coal, which is found abundantly the world over, is non-porous. High-grade bituminous and semi-anthracite coals have carbon content as high as 90 per cent.This means that carbon molecules are more densely packed than in low-rank coals. The iron oxide-based catalysts cannot rupture the more stable ring-like hydrocarbon structures found in high-gade coal. But now scientists led by Matthias Haenel at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in M
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