How A Small Black Rock Saved A Planet – The Sasol Story

While oil prices rise above $115/barrel industry companies are looking to alternatives. But some of the alternatives burn dirtier than oil. One of these is coal-to-oil technology. . In South Africa, environmental groups say Sasol's facilities have emitted huge volumes of carbon dioxide and pollutants, including sulfur dioxide. Critics have claimed that these gasses have been causing respiratory illnesses and all that Sasol has said in its defense is that their plants emit less toxic fumes than other plants from other companies.
Sasol says it plans to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions per ton of product by 10 percent by 2015. Sasol and many other coal-to-oil proponents say that future coal-to-liquids plants can be built with newer technologies that trap carbon dioxide and store it, sharply reducing their emissions.
To many South Africans, Sasol is a huge success story. The company's daily production now meets about 30 percent of South Africa's transport-fuel needs. The country's 50-rand bank note even features a picture of one of Sasol's plants.
Coal-to-oil’s technology is tainted. It started in Germany in the 1920’s ad it was used to fuel the Nazi war machine in the 1930s and 1940s. International oil companies also experimented with the process but put it aside because oil was cheaper.
South Africa took a different view. The country lacked oil, but had enormous deposits of coal, much of which had limited market value because of its poor quality. In 1950, the government set up Sasol as a state-owned company and authorized funding for its first project, a coal-to-liquids facility called Sasolburg in the South African countryside.
When oil prices soared in the 1970s, South African officials decided to up the ante. They lent Sasol $6 billion to build two new facilities at Secunda -- each 10 times as large as Sasolburg. The government also privatized the company, listing it on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 1979. (The government maintains a 23.5 percent stake).
Today, Secunda is a buzzing industrial hub with 16,000 employees, miles of interlocking pipes and cables, and eight colossal silos. The silos, each big enough to contain a football field, cool steam involved in the conversion process. Fuel trucks wait along the edge of the facility to fill up with gasoline. Nearby mines produce more than 40 million metric tons of coal a year -- as much as all of Illinois.Outside the plant gates, Secunda has a boomtown feel. It has some 35,000 people, a BMW dealership and a multistory casino hotel called Graceland designed to evoke the "grand old age of Colonial America."
Sasol made its first inroads in countries such as Qatar that have big stockpiles of hard-to-transport natural gas. These countries were interested in Sasol's technology for turning natural gas into liquid fuel.
In marketing materials produced for Chinese government officials and investors, Sasol offers a simple message: By 2015, 70 percent of China's oil imports will come from the Middle East. Yet the country has coal reserves equivalent to more than half the oil in the Middle East.
In Montana, at least two companies, including the world's largest private-sector coal company, Peabody Energy Corp. of St. Louis, have said they are looking at potential coal-to-oil sites. Montana's Gov. Schweitzer says any excess carbon dioxide from a facility could be given to oil companies to be injected back into the ground to enhance recovery from old wells. Bringing Sasol on board is critical, says Gov. Schweitzer. He says Wall Street banks want the South Africans to play a role because Sasol is the only company with a track record in the business. To woo Sasol executives, he says, he took them on a flight over Montana coal country last year.
Sasol will continue to thrive but how does an individual in South Africa continue to survive against rapidly increasing gas prices and inflation? There is a solution.
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Article Source: http://babyboomerarticles.com

Ozzie Freedom, Water4Gas founder, is a "computer geek" and all his knowledge about automobiless is from hand-on experimentation rather than "schooling". Discover one of the best alternative fuel solutions

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