NTU Retort (Rifle-Coal Retort Design in the Karrick Dossier)

The NTU retort is the Nevada-Texas-Utah retort design referenced by the diagram filenames in the third the source archive Karrick capture: nturifleco.jpg and nturetortrifleco.jpg. The source caption identifies these as the NTU retorts at the US Bureau of Mines Oil-Shale Demonstration Plant, Rifle, Colorado, with an aerial view showing the crushing plant, shale storage bins, and retorts.

What the source indicates

• The dossier illustrates a retort apparatus rather than only describing one in prose.
• The naming suggests the design is associated with a specific coal feed, described in the filename as "rifle coal".
• A retort is the vessel in which Low-Temperature Carbonization (LTC) is carried out: coal is charged, heated to the carbonization range, and the evolved volatiles are drawn off for condensation into Coal Tar and gas, leaving Semi-Coke.

What is not established

The available material does not give the retort's dimensions, throughput, or heating arrangement. The source identifies the NTU designation as Nevada-Texas-Utah and locates the retorts at the US Bureau of Mines Oil-Shale Demonstration Plant, Rifle, Colorado, where they processed oil shale; the dossier's tables report Bureau of Mines analyses of the resulting NTU shale oil. No performance figures for the retort itself are attributed here.

Status

This page records a named apparatus appearing in the dossier's figure set. It is a stub by necessity: the source capture supplies the name and the existence of a diagram, not a specification. If a fuller capture of the dossier text describes the retort's construction or test results, this page should be expanded from that text.

Related work

• karrick-process
• Low-Temperature Carbonization (LTC)
• Semi-Coke
• Coal Tar
• Karrick Process Dossier (Third Capture): Low-Temperature Carbonization at the source archive — the source capture in which the retort diagrams appear.