Almost three years ago, world petroleum prices reached record highs.  Concerns about current and future petroleum costs for imported oil have  renewed interest in finding ways to use unconventional fossil-based  energy resources to displace petroleum-derived gasoline and diesel  fuels. The US has vast coal reserves however as a solid, coal is a poor  substitute for oil in the production of liquid transportation fuels.   Technology to convert coal to a synthetic crude oil (syn-crude)  substitute, however, could potentially address this problem to a  significant degree.  This course of action would lower prices and reduce  the transfer of wealth from U.S. oil consumers to foreign oil  producers, resulting in domestic economic gains and potential  national-security benefits. Many liquefaction processes have been  proposed and developed each which has its advantages and disadvantages.  It should be noted that as the severity of the conditions increases, the  capital costs of the associated equipment also increases, often  exponentially!  the minimum operating pressures and temperatures are  typically 2000 psi and 400 C.  The operating parameters for the UTA  process are included to illustrate just how significantly we have  improved on existing technology while still yielding a similar amount of  syn-crude per ton of maf coal

UTA methods of coal liquefaction

243rd National Meeting (2012)

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