First American International LLC, a company that operates on the Navajo Nation in northwest New Mexico, near Gallup, plans to open a refinery that will convert coal to oil.
According to information provided by the company, coal to oil refining is not a new concept. In 1925, German scientists Professor Franz Fischer and Dr. Hans Tropsch patented what would become known as the Fischer-Tropsch process. It was widely used by the Germans during World War II, accounting for nearly 10 percent of their total fuels and 25 percent of their automobile fuels.
First American International is promoting a new process, patented by American engineer Harold Bennett, that can produce the fuel at an estimated $50 million investment.
Unlike Fischer-Tropsch, the Bennett process creates a self-contained refinery that turns coal almost wholly into petroleum and char. The char is clean burning and can be utilized by power plants to meet all Environmental Protection Agency standards, or it can be further refined into metallurgical coke to be used in the steel industry. It operates on low heat and low pressure, unlike Fischer-Tropsch.
The Bennett process claims to be more than 99-percent efficient. “People hear this and they think it’s not possible, but it is and it works,” said Dennis Yellowhorse Jones, managing partner of First American, who saw the function of a prototype Bennett model in Albuquerque, N.M. “This is an amazing process that should attract people’s attention.”
Yellowhorse Jones, a general contractor and geologist, has spent a large part of his life researching and selling environmentally friendly minerals and technologies.
The Bennett process, once operational, will also be a huge uplift for the Navajo Nation, creating jobs in the community that faces 40 percent unemployment but has some of the largest coal reserves in the U.S. Furthermore, First American has also brokered a five-year, no-cost land lease for the proposed facility, located off Interstate 40 in Gallup, with prime access to railroad distribution, as well the interstate.
The facility will process 800,000 tons of coal each year and the infrastructure, a building to house the refinery, already exists. Additional facilities and expansion will follow once the initial facility is operating at capacity.
Yellowhorse Jones anticipates breaking ground on the new facility in the next year and a half with the potential for 25 new jobs once the facility is open.
While other companies have begun similar projects, Yellowhorse Jones says his company has the patent on this particular process and the other companies have much higher investment costs of $500 million to $5 billion. When asked why there was such a vast difference in those costs compared to his, Yellowhorse Jones said that he assumed it was because these were massive plants compared to the one he was constructing. Yellowhorse Jones said that the goal of this endeavor is to help the American people to no longer be dependent on foreign oil and to utilize the vast coal resources of the Navajo Nation.
