Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 17:01:50 +0000
Hi all,
Thanks for your information
about CB&Q E7 9935B. It turns out it was
scrapped in 1972 after a 23 year career in passenger
service. It appears that the experiment of using
synthetic diesel fuel had no long term negative
effects. There’s a photo online of it with a green
BN painted nose. It is NOT the E9 on display in
Texas. The locomotive pulled a special chartered
train from St. Louis to Louisiana, MO and back for
special guests on the occasion of the dedication of
the Bureau of Mines synthetic liquid fuels
demonstration plant in May, 1949. I did find
evidence in the National Archives just recently that
before the full scale test a sample of synthetic
diesel fuel was sent to the CB&Q testing lab in
Aurora where it “exceeded requirements” for use.
The military ultimately tested over 1 million
gallons of liquid fuels from the plant in everything
from jeeps to aircraft and found they were, “as good
or better” than conventional gasoline and diesel
fuels.
The attached photo is from the
official Bureau of Mines 1949 report.
This locomotive played a small
part in a much larger project that I’m researching
for an article and chapter in a book. Here’s a
short summary.
At the end
of World War II the United States sent several
groups of scientists and engineers to Germany to
search out and retrieve scientific and
technological artifacts and personnel that could
prove potentially useful in the ongoing war
against Japan and the coming cold war with the
Soviet Union. Project Paperclip was one of these
technology retrieval operations. While the use of
German scientists recruited during Project
Paperclip in the space race of the 1950s and 1960s
is well known and has long been a part of popular
culture, there were other aims of Project
Paperclip. One effort was to retrieve scientists,
engineers and apparatus from German synthetic
fuels plants. The Bureau of Mines had long been
aware of German research in producing liquid fuels
from coal. When German wartime advances were
combined with a postwar emphasis on energy
independence and with worries about a coal
industry in decline the Bureau initiated its
synthetic liquid fuels program. The Louisiana,
Missouri plant was a major part of this large
program. German scientists and equipment were
transported to Louisiana and combined with
American equipment and researchers to transform a
former wartime synthetic ammonia plant into a full
scale test plant for converting coal to liquid
motor fuels. The plant was a resounding
technological success, successfully producing 1.5
million gallons of liquid motor fuels from coal
and at efficiencies greatly improved from German
wartime plants built just a few years earlier.
The economics of production were however hotly
debated and ultimately, with a new conservative
Congress and Republican President, served to help
kill the program. It was significantly cheaper to
import oil from the expanding oilfields of the
middle east with war surplus tankers than to
develop a domestic synthetic fuel industry costing
billions of dollars. The plant was sold to
Hercules Chemical, converted back to a synthetic
ammonia and urea plant and remains in operation
today. (Some German made apparatus remains on
site.) The program was a source of great pride for
the community and is fondly remembered by local
citizens even today, 60 years after the Bureau
eliminated the program.
The Synthetic Fuels program
was widely reported in the technical and trade press
and did get some newspaper coverage in the late
1940s and early 1950s but there is little written
with an historical perspective. If any of you are
really interested in this program, I can send you
some citations.
Thanks again!
Jeff
Jeff Schramm, PhD
History and Political Science
Department
Missouri University of Science
and Technology
Rolla, Missouri
