The Nazis did it!
When the natural petroleum supplies at Ploesti and in western Hungary
were insufficient for the German war-machine in the final 2-years of WWII,
the Germans built huge production-plants to convert coal into gasoline.
It kept German aircraft flying and German vehicles moving until the
spring of 1945.

What's more! The American Army carted off the blueprints, chemical
formulae and even disassembled plants and machinery used to convert
coal to gasoline. [To the victor go the spoils].

So why couldn't the US government dig up those confiscated blueprints and reverse-engineer those WWII German coal-to-gasoline production facilities?...There's hundreds of year's-worth of coal in the Appalachian
Mountains that can be converted to gasoline.

Jacob

"A journey of a 1000 miles begins with one step."
CHINESE PROVERB