Rank - Macerals - Chemical Composition - Chemical Reactions - Physical Properties - Coal Bed Methane

What is Coal?

Like the elephant of the fable, coal is many things, depending on what kind of question you ask about it:

Energy: Coal is an abundant source of energy, found widely in the world, on every continent (including Antarctica), often in immense deposits. Combustion of coal provides a surprisingly large fraction of the world’s electric power. North America has large deposits in both Canada and the US. Large US deposits are found in the middle-Atlantic states, the southeast, across the middle-west, on the great plains, in the Rocky Mountains, in Texas and in Alaska.

Geology: Coal is a complex and interesting solid, typically found in parallel layers called seams separated by layers of shale. Coal seams range from a few inches to hundreds of feet thick. Coal has long provided a direct guide to geological history because it is a solid that stays where it forms, unlike petroleum and natural gas that migrate through porous formations to accumulate in traps. Methane Coal Bed Methane trapped in the coal during its formation from vegetable materials can be recovered and sold as natural gas.

Chemistry: Two centuries of research has shown much about the composition of coal, but the complexity of a single sample and the wide variety natural coals in the world has largely defeated efforts to assemble a single model hat succeeds in predicting chemical behavior from measurable properties.

Pollution: Coal is a source of sulfur and particulate pollution, especially from older coal-burning utilities. It is also an important source of airborne mercury, a problem currently being addressed by the EPA. Improvements in combustion and control technologies in the last 25 years have markedly reduced this problem, and the problem will continue to decrease as older plants are retired and replaced.

Conversion: Coal is a source of clean gaseous and liquid fuels with the potential to substitute for petroleum and natural gas. Several methods exist for making solid fuels that are less polluting than the original coal.

Chemicals: Coal is a source of chemicals used in making modern materials ranging from fabrics to soft drink bottles.

Economics: Coal is a widely traded commodity, shipped across continents by unit trains and from continent to continent by immense freighters.