Coal Bricks

A new figure appeared in the coal industry last week when Prestcoke Corp. of Chicago formally opened its first plant. In at one end went bituminous coal, out at the other came shiny briquets, while coal dealers and the Press watched and listened to the high hopes of the promoters: Clarence S. Lomax, inventor; Charles Edison Poyer, grandnephew of Thomas Alva Edison; Thomas Hitchcock Jr., international polo captain. The infant company asserts it has found the long-sought low-temperature distillation process for converting bituminous into a smokeless, slow-burning fuel which will undersell retail anthracite. If the process really works commercially, it may prove to be the tonic so badly needed by the bituminous mines of the Midwest.

The soft-coal-into-hard-coal idea is an old one, its history strewn with failures. Hundreds of schemes of low-temperature carbonization have been exhaustively investigated. Chief of these was the German KSG process, which was exploited by International Combustion Engineering Corp., now in the hands of receivers. The Prestcoke method, fruit of eight years experiment, has unique features: briquets that do not crumble; a product free from clinkers with only one-half anthracite’s ash, one-quarter its moisture; a high yield of gas and tar. Gas is salable, tar less so. Former projects have suffered through inability to obtain a balanced market for these byproducts. Prestcoke’s prospects are brightest west of the Alleghenies, where freight charges handicap anthracite fatally. Even there it will meet bitter competition from fast-burning coke, gas, oil, and the new automatic stokers, which employ small sizes of bituminous coal with promising results.