WI an earlier Coldry Process?

The Coldry Process was discovered and developed just north of here in a little (now closed) coal mine. In the 80s a scientist noticed that after rain the tracks in the mine that truks drove on caused a reaction within the coal that both squeezed out the water and stopped it's reabsorbtion. The process was proved and is only just now being commercialised.

It's an awesome process, it involves little energy input, works at low pressures and temperatures, the only by-product is distilled water and the result if coal as energy efficient as black coal but with less impurities, meaning less shit in the waste ash.

But the conditions of it's discovery surely could have happened at almost any time in the 20th century, and the industrial process looks embarassingly easy and hassle free.

So WI this was discovered and exploited earlier?
 
It would be interesting if the Nazis got hold of it, considering what they did with synthetic oil and rubber. How much more efficient would their economy be if it only used black coal and it's Coldry equivalent?
 
From wikipedia, the major coal-producing countries with the most lignite as a percentage of coal reserves are Australia (about half), Germany (almost all), and Serbia (almost all). So presumably they benefit the most.
 
Romania also had sizeable lignite deposits.

I say 'had', since many have been depleted in the mid-80s.

Then again, Romania also has its own black coal deposits, so not sure about how much they would employ the process.
 
From what I can gather black coal is already as good as coal is going to get, the Coldry Process only gets shitty brown coal up to black coal standards of energy and the like.

I know I'm grasping at straws and it's a sublte change, but I was hoping the head-shed here could throw up some ideas.

For example I read in "Wages of Destruction" that the area occupied by the Germans by late 1940 had just enough coal to cover the needs of the economies of both Germany and the occupied territories. But average/poor administration meant that there were shortages everywhere and this is why French industry underperformed for Germany in WW2. But WI the coal reserves were producing twice as much power as OTL due to the newly spreading Coldry Process?
 
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