Patent ID: 8309616

Claim:
A method of producing liquid fuels from coal or coal+biomass or other solid hydrocarbons, comprising: Gasifying a starting material selected from a group consisting of coal, biomass, waste hydrocarbons, and mixtures thereof to produce a syngas; Subjecting said syngas to Fischer-Tropsch synthesis (FTS) to produce a hydrocarbon product stream; Separating said hydrocarbon product stream into C1-C4 hydrocarbons and C5+hydrocarbons that are used as liquid fuels; Subjecting said C1-C4 hydrocarbons to catalytic dehydrogenation (CDH) in the presence of a catalyst to produce hydrogen (H 2 ) and multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT); Utilizing energy released in cooling the syngas from a gasification temperature of between about 1,500-1,600° K to a useful operating temperature for the CDH reaction of about 1,000° K to provide the activation enthalpy required for catalytic dehydrogenation; Mixing said H 2 with the syngas from said gasifier to increase the H 2 /CO ratio of the syngas for FTS to 2.0 or higher thereby enabling production of liquid fuels by combined FTS and CDH with significantly reduced CO 2 emissions relative to conventional FTS processing; Cleaning said MWCNT and dissolving said CDH catalyst in a cleaning solution; Recovering the MWCNT from the cleaning solution by centrifugation, filtration, or other techniques; Recovering said catalyst from the resulting cleaning solution by standard precipitation methods and recycling it to the CDH reactor.