Jerome John Morgan

If you are old enough, you may remember huge cylindrical towers scattered around your city. These were gas holders


Although natural gas had been used in China in ancient times and in Pittsburg in the 18th century, the world relied on manufactured gas until the later part of the 20th century. The original manufactured gas product was “coal gas”, from destructive distillation of coal producing a mixture of (mostly) methane and hydrogen. This was gradually supplemented and supplanted by “water gas”, made by alternating blowing steam and air through a coal bed to produce a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen (ironic that people once paid to have carbon monoxide piped to their houses; “water gas” also lead to suicide by people sticking their heads in an unlit oven, which with natural gas won’t have much of an effect except really surprising the next person to strike a match in the house). On the West Coast, it was cheaper to use crude oil as a feedstock to make “Pacific Coast Oil Gas”; this was similar to water gas but with a larger amount of miscellaneous hydrocarbon vapors.


(The term “water gas” also lead to a bunch of junk science; when the process was new all that many people knew about it was that you could somehow make an explosive gas by heating water. Although it’s not mentioned in this book, in the 19th century there were a number of lawsuits over boiler explosions where the defense claimed that they were not the result of poor practice but rather the quasi-magical but unintentional manufacture and subsequent explosion of “water gas”).


At any rate, what really impressed me was the immense infrastructure involved in manufactured gas: gas retorts and piping, fire brick, automatic coal charging and ash removal machinery, interlocking valve equipment, purifying apparatus to remove ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, sulfur compounds, phenols, and tar, specialized boilers to produce steam, waste heat recovery units, and so on. When the market for this stuff disappeared, it must have caused industrial dislocation perhaps only rivaled by the demise of steam locomotives. The manufactured gas industry had already reinvented itself once; the initial market for gas was for lighting, and when that was replaced by electricity the gas industry switched to providing gas for cooking and heating.


What I was interested in was waste products, and the book provides considerable detail on those. Phenols and tar were removed by various scrubbers; I was a little surprised to find electrostatic precipitators already in use (the book was published in 1931). Collected material could be sold as chemical feedstock if there was a local market or recycled as boiler fuel if there wasn’t. The nitrogen in coal formed ammonia compounds which were removed by distillation and sold as fertilizer; at the time the book was written this was becoming uneconomical because of competition from synthetic ammonia. Sulfur compounds were extracted by passing gas through iron oxide and could also be sold for fertilizer; the spent iron oxide could be regenerated by air exposure. Coal gasification produced coke which could then go to steel works. Disposition of other solid residuals – ashes, etc. – wasn’t mentioned.


There’s a whole chapter on “low temperature carbonization” (“low temperature” is relative – 800° F rather than 1600° F) to maximize production of liquid hydrocarbons – i.e., what would now be called coal liquefaction. The irony is that in 1931 coal liquefaction was considered to have future potential but not to be practical under current conditions; the products and byproducts produced were sufficiently different from standard water gas methods to be unmarketable. Which is about the same as in 2010.


The main problem with the book is its extensive use of industry jargon, (for example, a coal retort is often called a “bench”) and the use of English measurements (although I’m perfectly comfortable with grams/liter or ppm, I have some difficulty imagining exact what 6.2 grains of hydrogen sulfide/100 cubic foot of gas.


The odds that you’ll run across this one are low, but there may be similar books in your public library, especially if you have one of those that never throw anything out. If you happen to run across Volume II somewhere, let me know.… (plus d'informations)