Word: tropsch
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...refers to Sasol's "dirty little secret", supposedly that Sasol used a process also used by Nazi Germany [Sept. 15]. The founder of Sasol was my brother, the late Etienne Rousseau, a chemical engineer. In 1990 he described to me how he had used a combination of the Fischer-Tropsch and the complementary American Kellogg process, not the German process only. Moreover it is common knowledge that after World War II the U.S. used captured German scientists to work on synthetic fuels. This was a U.S. Bureau of Mining project instigated by the Synthetic Liquid Fuels Act. Not many people...
...first, about that dubious past. Sasol's origins can be traced to the work of two German scientists, Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch, who in 1923 came up with a process to convert coal to liquid fuel. When Adolf Hitler seized power in coal-rich, oil-poor Germany in 1933, the Nazis used the Fischer-Tropsch process to help power their military expansion across Europe; during World War II, Germany was producing 125,000 bbl. of synthetic fuel a day at 25 plants. After the war, a South African entrepreneur called "Slip" Menell bought the South African rights to Fischer...
...product is cleaner than the average diesel fuel or gasoline, emitting less sulfur and less nitrogen when it burns, says Barrows. Coal-to-liquid plants can also be used to clean up the mountains of coal left over at old mines. But in terms of carbon emissions, Fischer-Tropsch is dirty. A sliding scale of emissions from fossil fuels, goes: coal, petroleum, methane. Coal emits the most carbon dioxide per unit of energy obtained. The resultant fuel also emits more carbon dioxide when burned. "It's a double whammy," says Barrows. Ricketts cautions that Sasol's Secunda plant, which produces...
...amounts of hydrogen to coal at high temperatures and under very great pressure: it results in a rough equalization of the ratios of hydrogen and carbon molecules in coal. Frederich Bergius developed the process for turning coal into crude oil in Germany in 1913, and Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch devised a catalytic process for converting coal directly into gasoline in 1925. During World War II the Bergius and Fischer-Tropsch processes supplied the Nazi government with petroleum, and in late 1945 several German liquefaction plants were dismantled and brought to the United States for study...
...from-gas plant, Carthage will use a variation of a method which Dobie Keith became familiar with during a visit to Germany in the thirties. With the Fischer-Tropsch method, the Germans made gasoline out of coal. But the gasoline was only 40-octane, and the method was too expensive for commercial use in this country. Keith worked out a similar method of making gasoline from natural gas, thinks he has made it commercially feasible. In brief, natural gas is burned with oxygen to produce carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which can then be reacted to produce liquid hydrocarbons, i.e., gasoline...