Chapter 253: Chapter 249 Scientific Thinking and Alchemy
The coal-to-oil technology originated in World War II Germany, when German chemists sought to use this technology to replace oil with coal, thus addressing Germany’s shortage of oil.
The core of this technology is using coal as a raw material to produce oil products and petrochemical products through chemical processing, including two technological routes: direct coal liquefaction and indirect coal liquefaction.
Direct coal liquefaction technology involves liquefying raw coal directly into liquid hydrocarbon fuels under high temperature and high pressure with catalytic hydrogenation, removing atoms such as sulfur, nitrogen, and oxygen.
This technology has high requirements for the quality of raw coal, with early technology requiring a reaction temperature of 470℃ and a reaction pressure of 70MPa.
Moreover, the fuel obtained through this technology has high levels of aromatic compounds, sulfur, and nitrogen impurities, with low cetane value, making direct use in engines difficult and requiring further processing to meet finished oil standards.
Thus, this technology did not receive widespread application and attention until the later oil crisis led countries to reconsider it, developing hydrogen-coal method, solvent-refined coal method, hydrogen-supply solvent method, etc., as second-generation technologies.
Although these technologies have greatly improved compared to the first generation, their high costs mean they do not have value for large-scale industrialization.
Before Perfikot’s journey, mainstream technologies of different countries had already evolved to the third generation, but what she encountered was not the direct coal liquefaction technology, but rather the indirect liquefaction technology that involves producing synthesis gas from raw coal and then processing it to produce oil products or chemical products.
This technology does not have such high requirements, needing only to gasify the raw coal first, then purify it to get raw gas of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Then, under the environment of around 270~350℃ and 2.5MPa, oil products or chemical products can be synthesized with the help of a catalyst.
For Perfikot, coal-to-oil can indeed meet industrial production needs without oil, but even in her world before crossing over, this set of technology was not fully mature, and directly applying it to this world was beyond her ability.
Unless she could open more pages of the Jade Record, obtain that ability to gain technology as needed, it might be possible to establish the entire coal-to-oil chemical system.
After all, the matters involved here are too complex. Even though Perfikot had encountered them before, reproducing them now was difficult for her.
However, fortunately, this is a world where alchemy exists. Coal-to-oil is complex in the original world, but in this world? Understanding the concept of turning stone into gold might help.
For Perfikot, she can completely design an alchemical ritual to transform coal into oil.
No, given her attainments in alchemy, Perfikot can even directly transform coal into various oil products and petrochemical products she wants.
This is where Perfikot suddenly had the epiphany; she had fallen into a certain blind spot in some respects, that is, she didn’t need to replicate the technology from her original world but should use the technology of this world to achieve similar, identical, or even superior results.
Just like oil, in the original world, various fractions of oil need to be extracted using distillation technology for different uses after separation.
Meanwhile, using alchemy... breaking down matter only counts as a basic course in alchemy, not even involving material conversion. Any apprentice who received systematic education can achieve it.
Thinking about this, Perfikot felt her thinking was limited by her life’s experiences in the original world.
In the original world, there is no technology like alchemy to press physics and chemistry down, although according to Occam’s Razor principle there’s no need to add entities unnecessarily, when alchemy actually exists and can be falsified, then it is scientific.
But alchemy, which can change the form or even structure of matter, only consumes the Spiritual Power of the alchemist. In the original world, this completely breaks the conventional rational scientific cognition.
So, for Perfikot, what she needs is to break her original inertia of thinking and think from an angle closer to alchemy.
As an example, if she thinks about the current problems from the alchemical perspective, she wouldn’t consider replicating the oil distillation and coal-to-oil technologies of the original world, but instead how to achieve her purpose using alchemy.
She has many methods of decomposing oil, whether taking out various different substances one by one or setting different goals and then transforming crude oil composed of multiple materials into single substances; all of these can be done.
Ordinary alchemists can’t do what Perfikot can do, using the Philosopher’s Stone to create something from nothing, but they can at least transform existing substances into new substances.
Even a qualified alchemy apprentice can design a scheme to separate oil into different single substances, thus obtaining the desired products.
As for catalysis, synthesis, reaction, etc., these are entry-level things for alchemy.
To put it more simply, alchemy can use a set of alchemical rituals to directly transform crude oil into various required finished products, without needing to go through step-by-step separation and reprocessing like petrochemicals.
Coal-to-oil is the same, directly transforming raw coal into crude oil can be done with alchemy, let alone using raw coal as a raw material to refine various required substances.
This is really just specifying the raw material and transforming it into the needed product, which alchemy has deeply researched for many years. Perfikot can entirely throw it to those professors and apprentices in alchemy to handle, as long as Perfikot states her requirements, they can do it without even needing direction.
In fact, this level of requirements would even be considered an insult to those alchemy professors, as any ordinary alchemist could manage it.
Of course, achieving these things through alchemy and industrialized production are still quite different.
Simply setting up a small workshop to meet usage needs indeed can be managed by a few moderately skilled alchemists.
But wanting to obtain industrial raw materials or finished products from oil and coal like a factory assembly line requires setting up production lines and process procedures as normal.
Only the principle changes from original chemistry and physics to alchemy.
And what Perfikot has to do is to first use alchemy herself to decompose, transform, and synthesize oil and coal, to first obtain all the things she needs, and then hand these over to those alchemical professors and other alchemists, asking them to design production schemes according to her goals.