[Terrapreta] Coal oil and fertiliser urea production in Australia.

[Barry Batchelor]

Hi All

Thought some might be intereted in the following,

Brown Coal no use in a standard form for Agi soils?

Regards

Barry

Taken from ABC australia's new website
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/06/03/2263839.htm

Snip
With no relief in sight for oil prices, turning Australia's vast coal 
stocks into diesel could be a potential solution to the energy crisis.

The coal industry says its resource is the forgotten solution to the 
crisis, with the technology now available to make the transformation.

The process is already in place in South Africa and proponents say it is 
commercially viable here as well.

Allan Blood, chairman of the Australian Energy Company, says Australia 
is making the petrol crisis harder than it has to be.

"There is no reason why Australia could not be totally self-sufficient 
for petroleum needs using coal as a fix-stop," he said.

Mr Blood is the man behind a $2 billion project being launched today in 
Victoria's Latrobe Valley, which will turn brown coal into the 
fertiliser urea.

He says the same technology could also be used to turn coal into diesel 
for the transport industry.

"South Africans have been doing it since 1968 in a firm called Sasol," 
he said.

"They have been making 150,000 barrels a day and historians forget of 
course, but a lot of the diesel for the German war effort came from coal 
as well."

Producing diesel from coal has traditionally been a relatively expensive 
process but as oil prices have rocketed, the economic benefits of the 
process have increased.

"We are actually doing a study in the United States at the moment on a 
large plant to produce up to 150,000 barrels a day and we know the 
numbers very well and believe me that anything around the $60 a barrel 
mark, this is an extremely economic process," Mr Blood said.


    Looming horizon

Optimistic industry figures, including Mr Blood, predict that this 
technology could be producing diesel for Australian transport workers in 
four to five years.

John Boshier, the executive director of the National Generators Forum, 
says using coal to make diesel is a real possibility.

"Australia has a lot of brown coal and it is very realistic. The cost of 
course is the issue but it is commonly believed that with oil prices 
over $100 a barrel, that it would be commercially viable," he said.

Federal Resources Minister Martin Ferguson was unavailable to comment, 
but a spokesman said he was very interested in the role coal might play 
in moves to insulate Australia from world oil prices.

Mr Boshier says the production of transport fuel has not been on the 
political radar until now but sustained high petrol prices will ensure 
that changes.

"The major difficulty for investors is how long will these high prices 
last and there seems to be a feeling now in the world that prices could 
stay high for quite some time so it is being looked at much more 
seriously," he said.

But Ray Prowse from the Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems at the 
Australian National University says using coal to replace petroleum 
would be a case of same problem, different resource.

"We've come across this problem with oil running out," he said.

"Now all we are going to do in terms of transferring the emphasis across 
to coal is to accelerate the rate at which the coal is used and just 
transfer the viability from oil through to coal and fairly soon we are 
going to find that we are running out of coal in exactly the same way 
that we are running out of oil at the moment."

Mr Boshier disagrees with that argument, because he does not see the 
same scarcity for coal that is pushing the price of oil up.

"There is no way in 30 years that the coal resource would be seriously 
depleted," he said.

"There is hundreds and hundreds of years of use of brown coal so I would 
imagine that one project could be followed by another, could be followed 
by another."

/Adapted from a World Today report by Jane Cowan.
/Snip