Word: coal
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...labyrinth of pipes and valves, tanks and towers rises above the flat bushveld 60 miles north of Johannesburg. At night chimneys spew a gas that casts an eerie orange glow over the surrounding expanse of coal fields. Downwind from the plant, 35,000 people live in Sasolburg, a city of green lawns and broad highways. Their job: to produce Sasol, a synthetic oil made from coal...
South Africa was early to capitalize on its coal resources, estimated to be 25 billion tons, or about one-seventh of the U.S.'s total. In 1950, the South African Coal, Oil & Gas Corp., known as SASOL, was formed and by 1955 Sasol gasoline was being sold. The state-owned company, which charges just over $2 per gal. of gas, began showing a profit in 1973 and last year had pretax profits of $140 million on sales that totaled close to $ 1 billion. Although environmentalists were alarmed at the potential damage -indeed, smoke often hangs like a gray curtain...
Precise details of the process are state secrets, but the general outlines are known. To extract the oil, the Sasol plant burns coal with oxygen and steam in a big cylindrical vessel until a gas forms above the ashes. Once the gas is cleaned of impurities-yielding valuable chemical byproducts in the process-it is mixed with a catalyst made of iron and other substances. This catalyst transforms the gas into liquid oil. Production costs amount to $17 per bbl. That is well below the OPEC price of around $20 per bbl. and much less than...
...present plant. The $2.9 billion Sasol II will be environmentally cleaner; precipitators above the boilers will extract chemical fumes and reduce air pollution, and water will be recycled rather than dumped in rivers. In addition, productivity will be higher: 1.78 bbl. of synthetic oil from each ton of coal, vs. 1.26 bbl. at present. As soon as that plant is finished next February, construction will start near by on Sasol III. Once the three plants are in operation, they will save an estimated $400 million a year in foreign exchange and produce about...
...model died at 240,000). His tools are two loose-leaf binders with summaries of his case docket and a black bag stuffed with lawyer's briefs. His territory is his state's western panhandle. It is sparse ranch and farm country, though railroads hauling low-sulfur coal have made the local junction, Alliance (pop. 10,000), a boom town. The mean Midwest weather that Judge Moran encounters has not changed since Lawyer Abraham Lincoln rode Illinois' Eight Circuit. Carl Sandburg described it: "Mean was the journey in the mud of spring thaws, in the blowing sleet...