The Wankel engine in the Mazda RX-8 houses a rapidly spinning cam that is shaped to compress and combust fuel and air against the inside of an oval chamber.
Moreover, much of the coal he bought from Burlington is low-quality lignite, a brownish fuel one step removed from peat, which can't be transported because it tends to spontaneously combust.
But the problem is that it takes a lot of natural gas to isolate the hydrogen, leaving many to say that it would be more productive to just combust the natural gas in a conventional engine.