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Cabinet/Low-temperature carbonization

LLM Wiki article / 2 minute read

Lewis Cass Karrick

Lewis Cass Karrick is an American fuel technologist and twentieth-century engineer for whom the karrick-process is named. The process is a low-temperature carbonization route for converting coal into char, tar/oil and gas. He is the central subject of a source dossier in the archive's low-temperature carbonization grouping.

Role in the source

The dossier presents Karrick as the developer of the named process and as the figure around whom the archive builds its account of low-temperature carbonization as a suppressed alternative to petroleum-derived liquid fuel. The process, the yield claims, and the historical-suppression narrative are all organized around him. The dossier treats his work as an early effort to obtain liquid fuel from solid feedstock at low temperature, and frames its later neglect as a matter of commercial displacement rather than technical failure.

The supplied sources are two University of Utah theses prepared under Karrick's direction: Larsen & Stutz (1932) on plant design, and Jacobsen & Carter (1933) on cannel coal tests. They name collaborators and institutional context, including Wardrop, Dean Ketchum, and the Utah Research Foundation.

Institutional context

The dossier presents Karrick as an engineer associated with the United States Bureau of Mines, working on the conversion of coal and oil shale into liquid and gaseous fuels. See US Bureau of Mines.

Claims attached to him

  • Development of a low-temperature carbonization process operating below conventional coking temperatures.
  • Reported pilot or demonstration-scale testing. The Larsen & Stutz thesis describes a University of Utah demonstration unit and a proposed commercial plant; the Jacobsen & Carter thesis reports eight test runs on Utah cannel coal. The sources also cite Karrick's earlier work at the Pittsburgh experimental station reported by Frey and Yent.
  • The archive's assertion that the process was commercially sidelined by petroleum interests. This is the archive's framing, not a documented finding.
  • Claims attributed to Karrick's process — notably the roughly one-barrel-per-ton-of-coal yield — are dossier assertions, not independently verified results. See Karrick Claims vs. Evidence: The Dossier's Assertions and the Absence of Test Data.

What the source does not establish

The ingested material consists of two theses (Larsen & Stutz 1932; Jacobsen & Carter 1933). It does not supply:

  • specific patent numbers assigned to Karrick, which would warrant individual entities/usXXXXXXX pages;
  • independent replication data; the theses report their own test runs and heat balances.

Nothing in the source establishes independent replication of the process.

Limits of the record

The supplied captures are text transcriptions of the two theses; some figures and sections are marked as not included. Biographical and technical specifics not present in the supplied text — dates, affiliations, patent numbers — should not be filled in from memory.

Related

Source notes & attribution
  1. https://rexresearch.com/karrick/1jacar.htm
  2. https://rexresearch.com/karrick/1larstz.htm

Dossier visual record.

All 28 figures

Source illustrations for Low-temperature carbonization. Captions identify the document and evidence type.

Articles that refer to this reading
Article
1 min

1ketch.htm — Karrick Subdirectory Page on the source archive

1ketch.htm is the filename of a page in the Karrick subdirectory of the source archive, at the URL [source note 1]. The page carries Richard Ketchum's 1932 report to the Joint Smoke Abatement Committee, "Feasibility of a Pilot Plant for Treating Coal by the Karrick Process."

Article
1 min

Byproduct Recovery in Carbonization

Byproduct recovery is the economic claim structure that carbonization advocates rely on: a single coal feed yields several saleable streams, so viability rests on the combined value of the products rather than on any one of them.

Article
2 min

Coal Carbonization vs. Coal Liquefaction

Coal conversion routes differ in what they optimize. Carbonization heats coal to drive off volatiles and leave a solid residue; liquefaction and hydrogenation aim primarily at liquid products.

Article
5 min

Karrick / KLTCUSP Capture: A Patent-and-Figure Dossier for Low-Temperature Carbonization

This is a source capture of the page karrick2/kltcusp.htm , filed in the archive's low-temperature-carbonization (LTC) folder. Unlike the earlier Karrick dossiers in the corpus, which carried explanatory prose about the process, this page is primarily a figure-and-patent dossier : it presents a set of GIF images, most of which a

Article
2 min

Karrick Claims vs. Evidence: The Dossier's Assertions and the Absence of Test Data

This page separates what the source dossier on the karrick-process asserts from what the ingested material actually supports. It follows the pattern established for other archive dossiers in this wiki, such as Bedini Claims vs. Evidence: The Patents, the Inventor's Disclaimers and the Absence of an Energy Balance and E-Cat Claim

Article
4 min

Karrick Page 1jacar.htm: A Third source Capture in the Coal Mining Library

This is a source capture of a page filed as 1jacar.htm , held under the site's Coal Mining Library path in a karrick/ sub-folder. It is the third Karrick-related item ingested into Bench, following Karrick Process and Low-Temperature Carbonization: A source Dossier (Provisional Record) (Karrick Process and Low-Temperature Carbon

All 19 referring articlesArticle
3 min

Karrick Page 1ketch.htm: An Empty source Capture in the Coal Mining Library

This record documents a source capture of a substantial 1932 report. The imported file [source note 5] contains the full text of Richard Ketchum's "Feasibility of a Pilot Plant for Treating Coal by the Karrick Process," a report to the Joint Smoke Abatement Committee dated October 28, 1932. The source URL is [source note 6].

Article
2 min

Karrick Patent Set (Seven US Patent Drawings in the KLTCUSP Capture)

The karrick2/kltcusp.htm capture reproduces eight GIF images, seven of which are named with bare seven-digit numbers. In this archive's convention, such filenames denote US patent numbers, and the images are the corresponding patent drawings. This page consolidates those seven references into a single record rather than creating

Article
1 min

Karrick Process

The Karrick process is a named variant of Low-Temperature Carbonization (LTC) attributed to the engineer Lewis Cass Karrick . It is the central subject of the source dossier ingested as [source note 1].

Article
4 min

Karrick Process

The Karrick process is a named low-temperature carbonization (LTC) route for coal, associated with Lewis Cass Karrick and documented in a source dossier. It heats coal below conventional coking temperatures to drive off volatiles, leaving a solid char together with condensable tar/oil and a combustible gas stream.

Article
4 min

Karrick Process Dossier (Fourth Capture): Low-Temperature Carbonization at the source archive

This page records a fourth capture of the source dossier on the karrick-process and Low-Temperature Carbonization (LTC) (LTC). It is a variant-provenance record, not a new body of evidence. The underlying subject — Lewis Cass Karrick's low-temperature carbonization work at the US Bureau of Mines , as described in a 1932 Universi

Article
4 min

Karrick Process Dossier (Second Ingestion): Low-Temperature Carbonization at the source archive

This page records a second source file covering the same subject matter as the earlier Karrick dossier: the low-temperature carbonization (LTC) of coal associated with Lewis Cass Karrick and the US Bureau of Mines . The file is a compilation of article text, patent references and three images ( karrick1.gif , karrick2.gif , karr

Article
4 min

Karrick Process Dossier (Third Capture): Low-Temperature Carbonization at the source archive

This is a source dossier on low-temperature carbonization (LTC) of coal, organized around the Karrick process and its namesake, Lewis Cass Karrick . The source identity ( karrick3/karrick3.htm , folder context "dossier 10 — Low-temperature carbonization") places it as the third Karrick page in the source archive collection.

Article
8 min

Karrick's Coal Retort US2165143A: Sloping Supports, Steam Circuits and Size-Dependent Deformation

US2165143A describes a vertical retort for the continuous low-temperature carbonization of intermediate-sized coal — the pea, nut and egg grades that sit awkwardly between dust and large lumps. Lewis C. Karrick's argument is that these sizes can be devolatilized in a tall column without the charge either fusing into an unworkabl

Article
1 min

Ketchum

Ketchum is the surname attached to the source archive author directory, ketchum/ , which hosts R. Ketchum, et al., Low Temperature Carbonization of Utah Coals , a report of the Utah Conservation & Research Foundation to the Governor & State Legislature (May 1939), at [source note 2]. The page is recorded in this wiki as 1ltcre.h

Article
3 min

Ketchum 1ltcre.htm

This record covers a source page captured from the URL [source note 3]. The page is a full-text reproduction of R. Ketchum, et al., Low Temperature Carbonization of Utah Coals , a report of the Utah Conservation & Research Foundation to the Governor & State Legislature (May 1939). It is a Ketchum-authored treatment of Low-Temper

Article
5 min

Low-Temperature Carbonization (LTC)

Low-temperature carbonization is the thermal treatment (destructive distillation / pyrolysis) of coal or oil shale at temperatures below those used in conventional coking — broadly in the 450–700 °C range — to drive off volatile matter and leave a solid char or semi-coke, together with a condensable tar/oil fraction and a combus

Article
7 min

The 1933 Utah Cannel Coal Thesis and the Larsen–Stutz Plant Design

These two studies concern the low-temperature carbonization method associated with Lewis Cass Karrick , but they were written by other authors. The evidence reviewed here shows that the first capture is not a Karrick-authored dossier but a 1933 University of Utah thesis by S. C. Jacobsen and G. W. Carter , and that the second is

Article
1 min

US Bureau of Mines

The US Bureau of Mines (also referred to as the United States Bureau of Mines ) was a federal agency that conducted research on mineral resources, mining safety, and fuel technology.

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