Thankfully I Don't Have a Coal Powered Car

The smog in major cities is bad enough, imagine if there was clouds of coal soot drifting around, my guess is the average age most folks would live to would be 45. Let's think back to December 1979, coal was the buzzword when Popular Mechanics covered "fuel for the future." Scientists in Germany had developed the Bergius method in 1913 to create a synthetic gasoline from brown coal.
More than 60 years later, market forces made the process appealing. "It is expected that by the late 1980s and early 1990s ... the price of imported oil will have risen enough to make synthetics fully competitive—perhaps even make them attractive," PM wrote.

Today, the search for oil alternatives is a priority for energy companies (see "The Shape of Fuels to Come" in this month's PM) and coal gasification is being studied anew, often in combination with carbon seques­tration. I can just imagine having to clean this baked on soot from used car parts where I work. What a nightmare!