[ExI] Sell your Bitcoins!

[Keith Henson]

On Sat, Jun 6, 2026 at 2:49 AM Kelly Anderson via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
snip

South Africa's plant that converts coal to oil is one of the largest
> CO2 emitters on the planet. My brother's career was spent working for
> the company that did that. I think I've told this story before, but
> the construction of that plant to avoid anti-aparteid sanctions is one
> of the better examples of unintended side effects out there. A short
> term problem, aparteid, which was going to eventually go down anyway,
> turned into a hundred year problem venting CO2 like a small volcano.
>
> In case someone thinks everyone who ate the shit sandwitch of voting
> for Trump is irrational, I'm currently in the process of installing a
> large array of solar panels on my property. Not for my house, but for
> my little factory.
>
> -Kelly
>

I knew (through an anti-scientific chat room) the US engineer who took a
ship load of North Dakota lignite coal to SA to test in the gasifiers at
the Sasol plant. This happened around 1980 when the US was concerned about
not having enough natural gas, so the Feds built this billion dollar
gasification synfuel plant that gasifies 16,000 tons of coal a day. The
syngas is passed through a nickel catalyst bed that converts it to methane.
By the time the plant was finished, shale gas had been developed. That
killed the economics, so the plant could never pay off the capital
investment. The government sold the plant for a dollar or some nominal fee
to a power company which has run the plant since then. They make and sell
synthetic natural gas into the national gas distribution network. They also
isolate the CO2 byproduct and ship that into Canada for enhanced oil
recovery. I don't know the relative size of this plant to the South African
plant.
Keith

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