Man-Made Inferno

Every year, millions of tons of coal are laboriously mined (at costs averaging $2.50 a ton), dumped into ovens and distilled, producing gas. For 80 years, scientists have been thinking of producing the gas without bothering to mine the coal. Lenin, picking up a British suggestion, wanted to try it in Russia. Since his death the Russians claim to have produced this kind of cheap power in many places.

Last week, the first big U.S. experiment with the process got under way at the Alabama Power Co.'s Gorgas mine, 55 miles northwest of Birmingham. (A small-scale test at the same site two years ago gave promising but inconclusive results.) A thermite bomb was exploded 160 ft. below the surface, at the bottom of a borehole at the south end of the seam. Running northward through the coal for 1,200 ft. were two parallel entries (tapped by additional boreholes every 300 ft.) through which air could be driven under pressure.

For the beginning of the test, the gaseous outpourings of Alabama's man-made inferno were drawn off at Borehole No. 2, limiting the combustion to the first 300-ft. stretch. The underground temperature went up to 900DEG F. Later it might go as high as 3,000DEG F. No immediate attempt was made to produce a useful, combustible gas: the first thing was to see how steadily the coal could be made to burn. Later, hot air, steam or oxygen could be fed into Borehole No. 1 to make a variety of gases with different chemical and thermal properties.

The Alabama Power Co., cooperating with the U.S. Bureau of Mines in the $500,000 test, was donating 500,000 tons of coal, willing to see it all go up in smoke and flame. The initial rate of burn-up was only 50 tons a day. The test would probably go on for a year.

If it proved possible to burn such vast amounts of coal without mining it, engineers foresaw these advantages:

P: Drastic reduction of costs.

P: Efficient use of coal in thin, tortuous, or hard-to-get-at seams.

P: Production of cheap power gas which could be burned near the site (in gas turbines) for generating electricity.

P: A supply of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, the "synthesis gas" used in converting coal to gasoline or diesel oil.

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