allanh comments please, page-11

The Fischer Tropsch process converts lignite (brown coal) to usable hydrocarbons.

It has advantages and drawbacks, particularly the enormous creates of carbon dioxide.

It is rally only of historical interest.

Since the invention of the original process by the German researchers Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch, working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the 1920s, many refinements and adjustments have been made, and the term "Fischer-Tropsch" now applies to a wide variety of similar processes (Fischer-Tropsch synthesis or Fischer-Tropsch chemistry). Fischer and Tropsch filed a number of patents, e.g. US patent no. 1,746,464, applied 1926, published 1930 [2].

The process was invented in petroleum-poor but coal-rich Germany in the 1920s, to produce liquid fuels. It was used by Germany and Japan during World War II to produce ersatz fuels. Germany's annual synthetic fuel production reached more than 124,000 barrels per day (19,700 m³/d) from 25 plants ~ 6.5 million tons in 1944.[3]

After the war, captured German scientists recruited in Operation Paperclip continued to work on synthetic fuels in the United States in a United States Bureau of Mines program initiated by the Synthetic Liquid Fuels Act.

In Britain, Alfred August Aicher obtained several patents for improvements to the process in the 1930s and 1940s, e.g. British patent no. 573,982, applied 1941, published 1945 [4]. Aicher's company was named Synthetic Oils Ltd but this is not thought to have any connection with the Canadian company of the same name.