• Journal of Energy Engineering
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.64-72
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• 2007

During the 2nd World War, several Coal-to-Liquid (CTL) plants were operated in Germany and England to convert coal to large volumes of liquid fuel. Big oil fields discovered in the Middle East after the war supplied crude oil at the low price and all CTL plants were forced to shut down. However, South Africa (Sasol) built a CTL plant in 1955 and 2 more plants afterward and the current production of coal-derived synfuel reached 150,000 bbl/day. Recently, the sustained high crude oil price and the fear of the "peak oil" rejuvenated the interest of CTL and several CTL projects are in progress. China established a plan to build CTL plants with the total capacity of 30 million tons of synfuel per year by 2030. China is building a direct coal liquefaction plant which is scheduled to produce 20,000bbl/day of synfuel in 2008. There are 8 CTL projects in USA either in the planning stage or in the ground-breaking stage. CTL projects are also carried out in Australia, Philippines, New Zealand, Indonesia and India. Korea needs to approach the CTL project in the perspective of the national energy security. In this paper, the history, the status, current activities and the prospect of CTL are described.