Word: sasol
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...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 is ahead of the U.S. in its development of synthetic fuel. For a country boycotted by most of OPEC and without its own oil reserves, necessity has fired innovation. Sasol now provides less than 10% of the 240,000 bbl. a day of oil that South Africa requires, but the country is spending $6 billion to build two more Sasol plants, which are expected to meet about half of its needs by the early 1980s...
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...
...holes of De Beers near Kimberley. The busy gold mines of the Witwatersrand (Ridge of White Waters) and the Orange Free State turn out 73% of the world's supply. Not far away, in the middle of the great Vaal River coal fields, the government-owned SASOL plant turns coal into oil, the only major product in which South Africa is not self-sufficient; 18 companies are now exploring for oil in Zululand and the Karroo...