The Fuel Problem

A competition instituted by the Ministry of Agriculture

The use of agricultural tractors has not progressed in recent years because, apart from oil, which is too expensive, we do not have a sufficient quantity of economical fuels. If this fuel question were definitively resolved, farmers would certainly use tractors on a large scale, because they can find their use on the farm alongside oxen and horses, and allow significant savings in labor.

Our distinguished collaborator, Mr. Ferrouillat, member of the Academy of Agriculture, reviews, in the Figaro économique, the different fuels currently existing and examines the services they can provide. Today, he deals with oil-based fuels, which are at the forefront of current events, the Ministry of Agriculture having opened a competition for oil-based fuels and devices for their use. An order of May 30 grants incentives to chemists who will submit, before October 1, 1924, reports concerning the research of metropolitan and colonial liquid fuels likely to replace petroleum derivatives.

The first class is reserved for methods concerning the transformation of vegetable oils.

The second class includes the processes of liquefaction of solid mineral fuels, transforming them into liquid hydrogen carbides and the economic production of liquid hydrogen carbides from the by-products of the distillation of coal (lignite, shale and peat).

The inventors may be invited by the central committee of mechanical culture to submit in support of their reports samples of the products obtained using their processes.

In addition, an exhibition of agricultural tractors and military trucks equipped with gasifiers as well as engines using vegetable oils, organized by the Minister of Agriculture, with the collaboration of the Minister of War, will take place in September or October 1924, in the Paris region.

Attached to this event will be a section reserved for fuels of the two classes above (fuels derived from vegetable oils and liquid hydrogen carbides derived from mineral fuels).

Persons wishing to participate in this exhibition must send to the Minister of Agriculture (Directorate of Agriculture 78, rue de Varenne, in Paris before August 15, 1924 at the latest, with a supporting memorandum, a note setting out the processes used and the surface area required for their exhibition.

Only persons who undertake to carry out tests using engines that they will have to provide at their own expense and risk and whose operation they will have to ensure themselves will be admitted to this exhibition.