SERIOUS WARNING.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 115, 4 November 1911, Page 2 (Supplement)

SERIOUS WARNING.

England without coal. We have ill this world of ours only a limited -ii]i|il.\' of storcd-up energy; in I he |!rili»h i-les a very limited one namely. <mi- coalfields. The rate at which this -upply is being exhausted ha- hemi increasing very steadily for ihe i:i-t ■!!) year-. The available quan-i'e!-i iii arii !ni.'.oiiii million Ions; it is e:i-;. to calcinate Unit if Ihe rate of woikuig as it is doing our i-'iiil will lie completely exhausted in 17.") year-. It may also lie. said that 17") .'cars is a loin; time; why, I my--eit' have seen a man whose father fought in. the '-]."> on tlie Pretender's side, marly 1711 years ago! In the life of it nation 17") years fs a span.— Sir William Kam-av's address t 0 the BritUh Association.' August 30.

What changes are likely to take place | during the next 17") years in the nature of our fuel twiitis T. Thorne Baker, K.C.N.. in a recent issue of the Daily Mail). Coal, the fuel made for us by long years of chemical change by Nature, has been looked upon as the only material of real value for providing heat, power and illumination until quite recently, and it is by far the most important fuel the world possesses. littt if, as Sir William Ramsay predicts, the hundred thousand million tons of coal now existing in our proved coalfields is used up at a rate constantly accelerated to such an extent that in less than 200 years it is exhausted, a new fuel must obviously take its place. In the first place, advances in engineering are enabling us to get more and more out of a given amount of fuel, though unless something very revolutionary takes place within the next few years this will only mean a relatively small economy. In the second place, oil fuel is becoming of greater importance year by year, and three years ago the world's output was over 20,000,000 tons for the twelve months. It is impossible to say what amount of oil is stored in the earth, but a.s coal diminishes the search for oil will become more critical and fresh sources will be found. Thirdly, there is, as William Ramsay suggests, the possibility of utilising our peat and increasing our forestsc; while, fourthly, there are probabilities of our eventually utilising sources 1 which at the present moment are only | known to or conceived by a small number of pioneer workers.

"HARNESSING THE SUN." We talk sometimes of "harnessing the sun," but the sun has already supplied us with coal, oil, and even the wind and flowing water which are used to a minor extent. Burning oil or coal has been called spending capital, yet there is no fundamental reason why new ways of utilising the sun's power should not be discovered.

The enormous stores of' power possessed by radio atcivity, at one time held out to us as being so full of promise, have so far been disappointing; yet the fact remains, as Sir Oliver Lodge observed in 1007, that the energy locked up in each cubic millimetre of the ether is equivalent to that given by a 1,000,000 kilowatt power-station working for 30.000.000 years.

To come back to matters of the present, however, we are obliged to realise j the improvements that are taking place ] and are projected in the utilisation of our own supplies of coal from the user's —not the seller's—point of view. Only last year the Daily Mail gave special prominence to the presidential speech of Mr. S. Z. de Ferranti at the Institution of Electrical Engineers, when he suggested the utilisation of coal supplies at ■the pit mouths, turning it there, under State supervision, into electricity by such efficient power plant as the steam turbine, and distributing it thence to factories, houses, and users of all kinds by means of high-tension cables. Power distribution over large areas is very economical when high voltages arc employed, and a pressure of many thousands of volts is quite common for an electrical supply from a generating station, where a waterfall is the source of primary power. Mr. dc Ferranti also dealt with the economy that woul densue by universal economy that would ensue by universal ; from the large central generating stations he conceived, and if any commission formed to deal with the question of our diminishing coal supplies turned his suggestions to practical account matters would assume a very different asr pect, and the fears expressed by Sir William Ramsay at the British Association would be far less serious.

OIL IN GREAT BRITAIN. It is quite unlikely that we shall in Great Britain tap sources of oil—unquestionably the future rival of coal —such as have been discovered in America and Russia, but the subject of oil fuel is interesting to discuss from the standpoint of all coal supplies ultimately becoming exhausted. No one can watch engineering progress without being struck with the extraordinary increase in the use of oil engines and oil fuel in almost every industry. Great advance has been made during the last two or three years in the construction of high-power internal combustion engines using more or less crude oil. while the increase in the use of oil fuel is frequently referred to in the press.

On the occasion of a recent visit to one of our largest iron and steel works, situated within a few minutes of their own coal pits, the writer noticed the installation of oil furnaces—doubtless an experiment, but one which surely indicated the progress of oil in its fight against coal.

There is a. wide field for research, too. in increasing the calorific value of oils, by modifying or changing their chemical constitution. Much may be done in this way in rendering what supplies of oil we possess more lasting, by diminishing the consumption required for a given amount of power.

ALCOHOL AS. FUEL. Now to turn to a source of fuel which is largely in the hands of the chemist — alcohol. Compared with petrol and paraffin, the salient properly of alcohol is as follows: Calorific value, in British thermal units per lb. Alcohol (ab-olute) 12.000 Petrol 20.000 Paraffin 23.100 These figures vary with different samples of petrol and paraffin, but represent the approximate values nevertheless. Although alcohol produced from heel, potatoes and molasses costs something like one shilling a gallon to produce, it its known that it can be made for about 3d per gallon from peat. The amount of peat in the United Kingdom is. of course, very considerable, and were the end of our coal supplies in view the use of alcohol for internal combustion engines would at once increase to an enormous extent. Tho report made on alcohol, as compared with petrol and other fuels for internal combustion engines, by the Fuels Committee of the United States Motor Union in 1907 is most convincing.

Quite a new field is opened up by some experiments which have been carried out by the municipality of Brunn,

'in Austria, in converting sewc.-age into illuminating gas. Putting aside all quibbles between < iccirie lighiing and gas companies as to which in the more economical, the fact remains Iha4. a- very large quantity of gas is used for lighting in this country, and that the end product, of the process of obtaining it from coal—viz.. coke —is a much-used, hut generally wasteful, commodity. Analyses made at JSruun have shown that amout 1.71b of solid matter are yielded by 100 gallons of sewerage, which in turn gives ti.s cubic feet of a gas which lias as good a calorific value as coal gas. while li produces a better illumination.