will coal ever replace petrol to run cars etc?

Question

ok, i need to answer this over the summer in preperation for my a level course next year. Like find out the advantages of using coal to run cars and so on, instead of petrol. (yeah, i know it's a stupid idea, and that it's never going to happen, but i seriously have no ideas). I mean, is there any way to make coal liqued at room temperaturs, so you can put it in pumps and cars etc, and so on?

I'm doing a level chemistry by the way.

Answer 1

i have driven in a transit van belonging to NCB in the 70's. I posted about this several days ago. It was a converted diesel engine and it ran on an emulsion of coal dust and water. i have been trying to find out what happened to the technology but no luck so far. Unless you were told it was coal dust and water emulsion, you would never have known. We need this technology now as oil is getting scarcer and scarcer.

Answer 2

Its a good idea, but anyone thats ever had a coal fire will tell you its durrrty. With coal you have to clean out the byproducts ie. carbon or soot. Even using it with steam you have this messy job. When coal burns the fire produces loads of soot besides carcinogens and CO2 emmisions.

Not only is it not as powerfull as petrol, with petrol the byproducts are gases so easily removed. With Coal Fired Electricity Plants, houses have to be positioned out of a zone surrounding the plant due to all the soot that falls from the chimney and coats peoples washing lines etc.

ADV: Its a solid fuel so does not need a container!

DISADV: Messy, dirty, produces nasty byproducts and carcinogens. Does not produce as much energy as petrol and diesel engines (hence why steam was replaced). Probably more expensive too as mines are profitably exhausted in the UK, meaning its too expensive to reopen them. Also outdated in the race for greener technologies.

Answer 3

No.

It's all to do with "energy density". In other words, the physical size of your fuel, compared to how far you can drive on it.

It is correct that gas can be extracted from coal, and used to power a car. This is becasue you are taking out the part of the coal with the highest calorific value (easily available stored energy), and we have the technology to compress it down to a very small size. In this way it becomes acceptable to carry that fuel around with you.

But solid coal is much too bulky, and you would need to carry a large volume of coal with you, making your "fuel tank" disproportionally large - unacceptably so. Hence it is not worthwhile wondering how the coal can power the engine, as it does not provide a car which is acceptable to the consumer market.

This same problem has plagued the development of electric cars, as to get a reasonable range on an electric car, most of the available space in the car is consumed by batteries, with little space left for people of luggage. This is because the energy stored per litre (cubic decimetre) is much lower for car batteries than for petrol, diesel, or LPG.

Nuclear fuel gives us the highest energy density of available fuel technology, but has its drawbacks as you can imagine.

Answer 4

The Germans developed a special system for turning coal into benzine, and apparently it was very successful.
The guy who said that coal was used to produce steam to drive a car was misinformed.
They had a steel plate welded on to the back of the car on which was a 2 chamber " boiler " in one half was high grade charcoal, and in the other was a charcoal fire, the gases of the charcoal were fed to the engine with a rubber hose with spiral outer cover.

Answer 5

The price of extraction and exploitation of oil, gas and coal is what will limit the "amount" of the remaining resource, NOT its physical presence. When the price of alternative energies is cheaper than that of fossil fuels, through free market pressures, then oil will become too expensive to extract in relation to other sources. This will not happen very soon since alternatives are generally 3X greater cost than fossil fuels and are only viable in small amounts through various governmental subsidies and other hidden subsidies such as food cost, land use policy and taxpayer funded infrastructure. The article that I trust the most on this time, which is known as "Peak" in economic terms, is about 2035 for oil, 2123 for Natural Gas (based on my various economics runs for my gas)and indeed coal may have already reached Peak Coal since the consumption volumes are flat and emissions limit the increased use of it at economic pricing. Coal is a prime illustrator of the issue. There will be mountains of Coal that will remain easily accessible, but will never be used! To put things in simple terms, if you drop cooking oil on a paper towel and leave it for 50 years, will you have cooking oil in 50 years - Yes, would you be able to extract it so that it was worth less than buying a new bottle of oil - No. Would you even want to use that old oil - No!

Answer 6

Yes, and we're already doing it here in the UK. BCG Energy use technology borrowed from the oil industry in a process know as underground coal gasification to convert the coal in to a synthetic gas. This syngas is then processed in to a synthetic diesel. The diesel will run in normal diesel engines, and in fact offers performance and environmental benefits over regular oil based diesel. It has a higher energy value, is lower in CO2, lower in NOX and particulates. We are also working on Hydrogen for clean power generation, and when the motor industry catches up this too could be used for road transport. In both cases we capture the CO2 made in the processing of the gas and return it deep underground.

Answer 7

The Germans ran vehicles on fuel derived from coal in WW2. The Americans are financing research into using coal derived fuels, trying to reduce dependence on oil by as much as 10%.

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/04/national_coal_c.html

Answer 8

Years ago, before and during WWII, steam engine driven cars and trucks used coal in a boiler (like the old steam engine) to produce high pressure steam to drive the vehicle using a piston engine.

Answer 9

This would have been an o-level question in my day.........have you considered the effect of heating coal in a test tube which has been plugged at one end with cotton wool i.e. the expanding air will escape but not be readily replaced. This should produce...........??
suggest you look at a 1960's elementary text book.

Answer 10

Israel has already developed a way to extract fuel from coal but the oil companies won't allow it to be researched and continued. I think zinc has something to do with the process.