100 years have lapsed between the first Nobel Prize honoured discovery of coal liquefaction and Koch’s new development of KDV coal-to-liquids.
The extremely profitability and the absolute environmental friendliness resulting from the efficiency and the simplicity of apparatus of the new procedure are revolutionary!
In 1913, the employee H. Speckens transformed the carbonisation product of peat into a benzene similar organic liquid at 450 °C and under a hydrogen pressure of 150 atm in the private lab of Friedrich Bergius. Further trials with brown and black coal also produced the benzene similar organic liquid. Still in the same year, Friedrich Bergius filed a patent application for a procedure for “coal-to-liquids” – the Bergius-Pier process.
In 1931, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded jointly to Friedrich Bergius and the chemist and chairman of the board of directors of the I.G. Farben, Carl Bosch, “in recognition to the invention and development of chemical high pressure methods”.
In 1923, Fischer and Tropsch further developed this technology. In Germany as well as in other parts of the world, scientist intensively worked on the procedure of coal liquefaction known under the term of FT to improve this technology which was too expensive compared with the production of fuels from crude oil. Today, systems which were manufactured based on this procedure are still in operation in South Africa and China. In Germany and Europe, existing plants were shut down already decades ago due to the high environmental burden and the economic inefficiency. Also China decided against further investments in this – meanwhile obsolete – technology in view of the high costs, the extreme high consumption of water and the unbearable environmental burden.
Following recent information, also the Iran decided in favour of the KDV technology.
In 1973, the chemist Dr. Christian Koch started to work with this technology. First, 17 years at SIEMENS which, however, closed the research institute. Dr. Koch received the patents granted until that moment instead of a redundancy payment and continued to develop this technology on his own. The discovery that a transformation of organic materials into oil was possible even without the presently usual high pressure and the relatively high temperature was pioneering. First, he successfully applied the developed process of KDV (katalytische drucklose Verölung – catalytic pressureless depolymerisation) using the added catalyst to process biomasses and similar. With the further development of the industrial manufacturing equipment it became possible to transform even brown coal into diesel oil. The KDV process also facilitates a transformation of all other organic materials as plants, wood, plastic, etc. to diesel oil – economically efficiently and without environmental burden. The energy of the future.
The relatively low KDV system costs, low operating costs (e.g. no water necessary! Own energy supply) and the very high efficiency (about 95%) make extremely low production costs possible with the transformation of – for example – brown coal (no addition of a catalyst necessary) into diesel oil of first quality according to EN 590 – and without burdening the environment. There are no chimneys and no exhaust gas torch in KDV systems. (With the first use of KDV technology in refineries, the revenue gained from crude oil increases by approx. 50%.) In case of systems with an hourly output of for example nominal 125,000 l/h and coal costs of 25 € / t, a price per litre diesel oil (EN 590) of approx. 0.16 euro / l is achieved. In case of comparable system sizes based on the FT process technology, the production costs are much higher. The vast costs of the significant environmental burden are not taken into consideration.
The implementation of this – compared with the old technology – new KDV technology, which is revolutionary in many aspects, is a MUST for the world if it does not want to disappear in smog and continue to consume fossil resources disrespectfully.