§ Mr. Skeetasked the Minister for Energy what commercial processes for obtaining oil from coal are available to the British Government; and what is the best estimate of production costs in dollars (United States) per barrel of the Lurgi process and the system adopted by SASOL in South Africa.
§ Mr. Patrick JenkinThe only oil from coal process available commercially 187W at the present time is the combination of Lurgi gasification and Fischer-Tropsch synthesis employed by the SASOL Corporation of South Africa to yield a range of products in which oil predominates. A rough guide to the cost of oil production by this route in a notional large plant in the United Kingdom can be obtained by use of a conversion factor of 2.5 which when multiplied by the delivered price of coal in £/ton provides an ex-works cost in terms of $/US barrel.