The stage of rediscovery that I had to follow was the actual version of syngas into methanol. Syngas is mostly just onoxide, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide. The version process is simir to others we've already structed with pressurized gas going into a rea chamber with a catalyst, then rec the partially pleted product before looping it babsp; I'm thankful that I remembered that metallic copper is the catalyst involved in this rea, so the only real variables I o rediscover were exactly how much pressure we needed, and what sort of scrubbing we'll o do on the syngas to remove the minor impurities still present iream.

  The way I've gone about this is by building a smaller pressure variable chamber, and using stone shaping to pressurize it. In our h pressure situations, we've utilized liquefied gases boiling t the pressure up in a closed system, for this, I'll have to design an actual pressor to get the gas pressure to the necessary ranges.

  Since my only real way of measuring pressure is against atmospheric pressure, that's what I used. The e of 55 days of research was that the rea proceeded at a fairly reasonable pace at about 50 times atmospheric pressure, and at about 500 degrees. The amount of methanol produced retty high, though after a few test cycles, it became clear that I o crify the syngas somehow. In short, there was enough residual trapounds that the copper catalyst slowly became less effective.

  Just from observation, it seems like the two major problematic materials still in the syngas were some amount of ashy substances, and sulfur based gases. The ashy substances would build up on the copper wool I was using, clogging it, and the copper itself was slowly being what I assume to be copper sulfide. The copper sulfide could just be re-reduced to copper, but opening up a pressure chamber to do that seems like a waste. Instead, we utilize our existing zinc reserves to act as a sacrificial metal during the initial purification steps. We take crushed zinc oxide, and run the gases through it, then o has formed into zinc sulfide again, we roast it to reform zinc oxide.

  A nice byproduct of doing this is the recovery of the sulfur as sulfur dioxide, which we use for making sulfuric acid. There are three other ges I'd like to make to the syngas produ lio hopefully further reduce impurities. I want to produce the gas at a high temperature to hopefully break down any of the rger anics that might have bee as the first step. Sed, I'd like to bubble the remaining gas through a dilute sodium hydroxide, then hydrochloric acid solution, then through ral water st. Finally, if the gas hasn't cooled enough by then, I want t it down to a fairly cold temperature to dense most of the water out. The hope being that all that bubbling through liquids will pull most particute matter out, and that aive substances, save for onoxide and hydrogen gas, will react with the acid and bases and also be removed.

  I tie forward with various aspects of filtration for syngas. While I'd wait for steps of the process to plete, I started doing some experiments with gas pression. I had many s with how exactly I'd get the gas pressed to the pressures necessary meically without pstics, rubber, or puter aided maing. However, I was struck by inspiration while I went into the city to buy food one day.

  While a demon was frying food in the dwarvehod, the handle on a pot full of oil came off. Well, to say the handle came off was wrong, the stone sheath on the handle cracked and slid off the rest of the handle. I asked if there was anything I could do to help, and they told me they'd normally just have someoh stoneshaping fix it ter by ref the stone directly along the handle, so I obliged them. The handle was very slightly bulbous at the far end, letting the stone grip the rest of the metal, but when it cracked it could slide off along the cracked bit. That gave me the idea to use acid washed lightstone as the g material for a piston.

  I don't o have a puter aided mae, I just need a the that I make a near perfect der on. The g for the pisto actually o be maed, it just be made from stone formed around the outside of the piston with stoneshaping. If the piston head is long enough, theolerand leakage of gas should be minimal. If the syngas is initially at atmospheric pressure, then we could either use a single piston to press it 60:1, or more realistically, use a few stages of pistons to get it to that level.

  All that to say, I've gone on a short detour over the st 20 days making a the, and it should be ready to use soon.

  Ohe the was do took a little bit of time to actually get used to using it. Thanks to the amount of ambient mana due to having the extra-rge mana crystal in our city, p devices like this with smaller mana engines is pretty easy. In fact, this mana powered the is so vehat after I finish what I'm doing with pistons, I'm going to try to get the meical team to make a few more of them and distribute them to the bcksmiths around the city. Holy, things like a drill press and other maing equipment will probably go a long ways toward improving the quality of manufactured goods.

  After a good 33 days of tinkering with designs, I came up with an automatic meical piston design that used a spring for the exit valve, and a side hole for the io meically press gas effectively. The spring in the exit valve will need repced occasionally, but that ultimately be chocked up as part of routine maintenanbsp; Other aspects of the piston will probably uning after that period of time anyway, so that should be fine.

  The extra filtration of the syngas seemed to be doing the trick as well, with far less of the copper catalyst going bad over hundreds of hours of syngas processing, even if the scale was retively small. I made a few dozen gallons of methanol during my testing, though it wasn't pure, still taining a det amount of water, and likely some other pounds. I'll o do some purification on it, but as is, I'm ready to have some of the stru process started. Purifying the end product should just be a matter of distiltion.

  stru has begun ohanol facility. Sihanol itself isn't that important of a secret, we're building it somewhat close to the paper facility, since a rge amount of it will be used in the paper bleag process. The facility will also produce it's own charcoal pellets for the gasifier process, redug transport needs. It also allowed me to trol the quality of the charcoal better than the old charcoal facility. This one is going to produce very high quality charcoal usier engineering designs and higher temperatures to produce purer carbon. That should also help extend the lifecycle of the other pos in the process.

  stru is on hold, however, as we're currently in the middle of a very severe storm. I'd been w on a three stage distiltion process for our methanol for 34 days when the weather started to get bad. It started with the wind pig up and the o getting choppy, and by the day, it was clear we were in a hurrie. This one is really bad too. Everyone is hunkered down, and I'm sure there will be signifit damage to parts of the isnd. Even if the sea walls hold, the amount of rain is almost certainly going to cause mudslides, and potentially even ndslides in the area.

  I'm very ed about our various industrial locations. It take months to repair industrial facilities if they're damaged, and the more facilities that are promised, the more the problem pound on itself. Without the sea walls or the dam, I'm almost certain that the damage would be worse thaorm that led to me building the dam and levees in the first pce, the rain and wind are just that bad right now.