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Energy Conservation in Illinois: 
COAL GASIFICATION 
by KENNETH W. GRANDYS and ALVIN K. GRANDYS 
(Reprinted by permission from Illinois Division of Energy) 
In recent years, the world supply of energy has fallen short of the increasing 
demand of industrialized and emerging, energy-starving nations. In the 
long run, nonexhaustible sources of energy will have to be found and ex- 
ploited. Solar and geothermal energy are being explored, as are breeder 
reactors, but none is expected to contribute greatly to our energy sources 
for some time. Fossil fuels are plentiful on the North American continent, 
and sufficient quantities of offshore oil, coal, tar, sand and oil shale are 
available to serve as stopgap supplies until nonexhaustible sources of 
energy can be developed. 
Natural gas is one of our most 
precious available energy sources. 
It is not only a cheap source of 
fuel, it is also the least polluting 
fossil fuel. As industry and utilities 
are forced to meet air pollution 
standards, existing supplies of nat- 
ural gas are being strained. 
The potentially massive gap be- 
tween natural gas supplies and de- 
mand has brought to light old and 
new ways to produce synthetic nat- 
ural gas (SNG) from other fossil 
fuels. More than a century ago, be- 
fore the discovery of cheap natural 
gas reserves, a low British thermal 
unit (BTU) gas made from coal was 
utilized for power and light gener- 
ation. Three major breakthroughs 
in coal utilization were made in 
oil-poor Germany. In 1913, Fried- 
rich Bergius developed a hydrogen- 
ation process to convert brown coal 
into crude oil. In 1925, Franz Fisch- 
er and Hans Tropsch devised a 
catalytic process that turned coal 
into gasoline. 
A more efficient version of the 
old town gas generator was devel- 
oped in 1936 by Lurgi Gesellschaft 
for Mineralotechnik m.b.H. of 
Frankfurt. (Figure 1) This process 
is now used in nearly sixty plants 
worldwide. United States research 
into the field moved very slowly. As 
early as 1910 the government set 
up the Department of the Interior 
Bureau of Mines. Not until 1960, 
when the department set up the 
Office of Coal Research, was coal 
research seriously begun. In 1964, a 
contract for a partially Federally 
funded coal gasification plant was 
established with the American Gas 
Association. 
The basic gasification process 
combines either coal or naptha 
with steam at high temperatures 
to produce methane. There are five 
basic coal gasification processes 
under research in the United States. 
We announce the cancellation 
of the 
Southern Illinois Audubon Campout 
October 3-5, 1975 
