Well nobody picked up on the syn-fuel idea. Dept. of Energy researchers have been working on this for many years and the technology is known. South Africa developed the "Sasol" technology which is an improvement on the old German methods using Ni and Fe calalysts to make liquid fuels from "baked coal" gas. If you heat coal in the absense of oxygen and spray water into the hot carbon you get "water gas" which is a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. That gas can be sent through special zeolite catalysts such as the famous ZMS5 which is a special form of aluminum oxide with special porous holes and "Shazam" out comes methanol, ethanol, propanol, etc., ie alcohols which are liquid fuels. When the price of gas gets up to what they pay in Europe you need to write to your Congressman and tell them to support building a "Sasol" pilot plant in the U.S. and get ready to switch over to coal as a fossil fuel which can be converted to liquid fuels. Perhaps you do not know there is an extreme rat race for science researchers to get federal grant money AND then when those researchers discover something practical, the U.S. Gov. owns the patent rights and that there is an agency whose sole job is to distribute those new processes to various companies. Do you see any potential for insider trading there? Anyway the North American continent is set with lots of coal but the U.S. needs to set up large scale pilot plants for conversion of coal to liquid fuels in the near future as well as open up the Alaskan oil fields.

Don Shillady
Retired Chemist/teenage rodder