So, you can't recycle old refineries except maybe for parts to build coal liquefiers. To liquefy coal, you must first make hydrogen. To do that, you can always use the old "town gas" method, an endothermic reaction. (C+H2O > H2+CO) Now, you have hydrogen but also carbon monoxide in equal parts by volume. Town gas needed LOTS of mercaptan so users can smell a leak before CO levels got too dangerous. Not good to replace natural gas. NG replaced town gas due in part to toxicity of town gas.

Now, if you take your still-hot town gas and mix hydrogen right with a catalyst, you get this: H2+H2+CO > CH3OH aka methanol. So, a coal gasifier making town gas with windmills to elecrolisise water gives the right mix. Catalyst and added heat sold separately. Mwethanol will work as a motor fuel but is on the toxic side. Not so great. Dragsters use methanol as the fuel. Re-nozzle a jet engine, and you can drive that jetliner after all. But the toxicity is a bonus for terrorists using planes as truck bombs. (not to mention the harassment of firefighters as methanol is water soluable so foam may not work)

With that, coal > methanol isn't so good a choice. But refining the methanol into hydrocarbon fuels will only add endothermic steps into the processing. Does anyone know the octane rating of methanol? I bet it'll be lousy as a diesel fuel becuse I bet it has a poor cetane rating. Its use in drag racing and Indy racing points to good if not excellent octane rating. As far as trucks and trains with diesels, it is not known if the glow plugs could be replaced with retrofit sparkplugs and a retrofit intake manifold to reduce the compression ratio to match the octane rating. The jet plane fuel issue is a near-no-brainer becuse jets are continuous-burn like a furnace so only re-nozzling is needed in theory. Heating oil as an issue gets problematic becuse of toxic vapours from the fuel tank. But the furnace can be re-nozzled like the jet. With trains, electrifying rail is the better choice to avoid the endothermic steps to make that fuel.

The name of the game energy-wise with using coal is to avoid when possible endothermic refining steps. Same is true of changing one hydrocarbon to another. That bit with adding hydrogen only makes the endothermia worse.