asked the Minister for Energy what commercial processes for obtaining oil from coal are available to the British Government; and what is the best estimate of production costs in dollars (United States) per barrel of the Lurgi process and the system adopted by SASOL in South Africa.

The only oil from coal process available commercially at the present time is the combination of Lurgi gasification and Fischer-Tropsch synthesis employed by the SASOL Corporation of South Africa to yield a range of products in which oil predominates. A rough guide to the cost of oil production by this route in a notional large plant in the United Kingdom can be obtained by use of a conversion factor of 2·5 which when multiplied by the delivered price of coal in £/ton provides an ex-works cost in terms of $/US barrel.