Word: gas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...book's basic thesis, which was reported in Foreign Affairs and TIME last spring, is both conventional and incontestable. It is that the nation's four basic fuels-petroleum, natural gas, coal and nuclear-are either depleting or face strong public opposition, and new energy sources must be phased in before the old are totally exhausted. The surprising aspect of Energy Future is its optimistic assessment of the potential of solar energy and conservation to carry the load as those "new sources...
...extreme, the Harvard study is gloomy to the point of being defeatist about fossil fuels. Energy Future offers no hope that much new oil can be found in drilled-out America. The authors largely write off as impractical the attempts to recover left-behind oil in old wells. Natural gas, in their view, also has a dim future because proven reserves have been steadily shrinking. Even before Three Mile Island, notes the book, nuclear power was declining. Finally, mining, transportation and pollution problems rule out big increases in coal production...
...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...