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Manufactured Gas Processes

Gas manufacture and residuals management quickly blossomed from the c. 1812 coal-gas retorts, to follow-on process such as:
 
Water Gas (Blue Gas = Fuel Gas)
Carburetted Water Gas
Oil Enhanced Water Gas
Oil Gas
Spirit ("Gasolene") Gas
Acetylene Gas
Beehive Non-Recovery Coke Ovens
Beehive Block Ovens
By-Product Coke Ovens
Gas Producers
Substitute Natural Gas
Synthetic Natural Gas
 
Most of these processes created some form of recalcitrant (long-lived) toxic residuals and wastes.
This page is being developed to put forth some introductions to the physical nature of each basic category listed above.
 
By-Product Coke Ovens
   This was a very successful attempt at harvesting the whole energy potential of gas manufactured from Coal Carbonization (aka Coal Distillation). The goal was to recover residuals that previously were released from Beehive Ovens as lost in smoke and in quench water. In this process the effort was to gather residuals and to convert residuals to valuable by-products, rather than to have the residuals join with plant wastes, both as an environmental threat, as well as a loss of potential plant infome.
 
HO Models of Small Coke Oven Bank & Quench Tower
 
Here is a fine job of HO railway modeling by a master modeler. This gives a good visual impression of the main components of Anglo-American gas-making technology at its late-1950s phase, and showing what appears to be a battery of 20 by-product coke ovens, the coal towers, the larry trackage, the pusher track and the discharge track, quench tower and the battery smokestack. 
 
In reality, at this point in time, coke ovens were constructed on a minimum of fifty-oven batteries, with the infrastructure shown.
 
Not shown is the quench-liquor sedimentation and cooling tank, and, of course, the by-product recovery plant and the connecting raw gas mains.
 
Note that these two images obviously were not presented (by the modeler) in their correct plant orientation, and that the oven unit and the quench unit are simple set aside from each other for better viewing. In reality, the twenty coke ovens would have a coal-charging larry and its trackage mounted on the oven tops and extending into the coal delivery tower. The larry would then shuttle back and forth from beneath the charging tower. Also in reality, an actual by-product oven plant would have had two sets of fifty oven each, one batter extending to either side of the coal charging tower.  But for our impression and that of the HO railroad modeler, this representative arrangement does the trick.

In the actual layout, the quench track would be set atop what appears to be an unpainted block of styrofoam running along the discharge side (when seen toward the viewer; in the upper image), and actually should be located on-line with the discharge side (also toward the viewer, in the upper image) of the ovens, and that the set quench-side rails should be directly in line with the discharge side of the ovens, but lying further to the left of the smokestack.

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