continued use of fossil fuels as counterproductive. By-products The by-products of coal gas manufacture included coke, coal tar, sulfur and ammonia; all useful products. Dyes, medicines, including sulfa drugs, saccharin and many organic compounds are therefore derived from coal gas. Coke is used as a smokeless fuel and for the manufacture of water gas and producer gas. Coal tar is subjected to fractional distillation to recover various products, including tar, for road surfacing benzole, a motor fuel creosote, a wood preservative phenol, used in the manufacture of plastics cresols, disinfectants Sulfur is used in the manufacture of sulfuric acid and ammonia is used in the manufacture of fertilizers. Commercialization According to the Gasification and Syngas Technologies Council, a trade association, there are globally 272 operating gasification plants with 686 gasifiers and 74 plants with 238 gasifiers under construction. Most of them use coal as feedstock. As of 2017 large scale expansion of the coal gasification industry was occurring only in China where local governments and energy companies promote the industry to provide jobs and a market for coal. For the most part, the plants are located in remote, coal-rich areas. The central government is aware of the conflicts with environmental goals: in addition to producing a great deal of carbon dioxide, the plants use a great deal of water in areas where water is scarce. Environmental impact Environmental impact of manufactured coal gas industry From its original development until the wide-scale adoption of natural gas, more than 50,000 manufactured gas plants were in existence in the United States alone. The process of manufacturing gas usually produced a number of by-products that contaminated the soil and groundwater in and around the manufacturing plant, so many former town gas plants are a serious environmental concern, and cleanup and remediation costs are often high. Manufactured gas plants (MGPs) were typically sited near or adjacent to waterways that were used to transport in coal and for the discharge of wastewater contaminated with tar, ammonia and/or drip oils, as well as outright waste tars and tar-water emulsions. In the earliest days of MGP operations, coal tar was considered a waste and often disposed into the environment in and around the plant locations. While uses for coal tar developed by the late-19th century, the market for tar varied and plants that could not sell tar at a given time could store tar for future use, attempt