Coal Joyride

Through Pittsburgh streets a procession of three flivvers, bearing five U.S. Senators and a Representative, tooled showily one day last week. The fuel that drove their cars gurgled into carburetors from glass jars exposed to public view. And the passengers had the air of men participating in an epoch-making event. Reason: the gasoline in the jars had been made from coal.

The Congressmen were members of a joint committee on war minerals, looking into a possible solution of the impending U.S. petroleum shortage. The show was staged by Dr. R. R. Sayers, director of the U.S. Bureau of Mines. But despite all the foofaraw, the Congressmen's ride was less epoch-making than it seemed. The plain scientific fact is that at the 1941 rate of consumption the U.S. is not likely to need coal for gasoline for at least 200 years. Reasons:

> The best U.S. coal for making oil now known (Birmingham, Ala. bituminous) yields 134 gallons of gas to the ton of coal. But even with the most efficient methods, gasoline from this coal still costs about 15-c- a gallon to produce, three times the cost of gasoline from petroleum.

> The Western hemisphere still has vast reserves in four gasoline sources cheaper than coal. In order of cost: 1) petroleum (some four billion tons of known reserves), 2) natural gas, 3) tar sands, 4) oil shales. All this adds up to 60 billion tons of oil; even if no new petroleum or natural gas reserves are found (unlikely), there would still be 40 billion tons left by the year 2,000.

> The Germans found out in 1914 how to manufacture gasoline by treating coal dust with hydrogen under heat and pressure arid have been forced to use it ever since, but they have never licked the high-cost problem. Says an American oil industry expert: "If the master technicians of the world [the Germans] were unable to work out a competitive product by this coal hydrogenation process after almost 30 years of effort, if the British failed to develop an economic method with the help of huge government subsidies, it is highly unlikely that the U.S. will find the answer."

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