Innovation in Coal Gasification, Australian Pilot Plant produces energy for Transportation

Australian company Linc Energy Ltd has announced the first production of diesel from its demonstration coal to liquid (CTL) facility at Chinchilla, Queensland. The firm claims this is the first time underground coal gasification has been combined with CTL, reducing the cost and life-cycle carbon emissions of the fuel.

Full news report and company link: Underground coal gasification
ref. Materials World Magazine, 01 Jan 2009.

More later.

NB.
In my Venn Diagramme "logo" I did distinguish between Energy for use in situ, eg.homes, factories, fixed machines as opposed to energy for transport (gas, petrol, diesel, kerosene..) This certainly requires a short post of explanation with acknowledgement to the origins and implication of this very important distinction. I shall come back to this in a later post.

Most of my posts on Coal Mining - Power Generation - Materials Processes Markets with a focus on Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) are concerned, implicitly, with power generation to produce the more efficient combined heat and electricity for classical non-mobile, not for transportation uses. Of course when electric powered vehicles reach a significant level in reducing CO2 emissions in road transport this distinction will, in the future, disappear.