Ken,
Amazing that the coal industry itself has been so near-sighted about the how to proceed. They should have been looking for value-added alternatives in the 50s at the start of the nuclear age and secured their own Manhattan project for coal redeployment. Emblematic of the ignorance: There was a report some time ago that one of Russia’s major coal deposits was absolutely loaded with bucky-balls and nano-diamonds – already fully formed… and yet for decades this extremely valuable resource was used to make coke at ~$20/ton and is now almost depleted. Talk about turning diamonds into ashes…. From: Ken Deboer That is exactly right, Jones! There are several papers and patents on feasible ways to use coal as high value products, especially CNTs, activated carbon, graphene, quantum dots etc. Here are four examples C. Xiang et al (J. Tour's group at Rice Univ) . Coal as an abundant source of graphene quantum dots. Nat. Comm. Doi.101038/ncomms3943; J. Satterfield, 2015 US Pat 9108186 "Phosphoric acid treatment of carbonaceous material prior to activation" ; Petrik V. 2010 US pat. "Mass production of carbon nanostructures"; Wu et al 2012. Efficient large scale synthesis of graphene from coal and its electrical properties studies. J Nanosci. Nanotech. 12:1-4. I have used Wu's method to make some of this stuff in my garage without difficulty. I could also make a pretty decent battery out of it. What to do about coal is the biggest political issue in my state of Montana (as well as Wyoming) right now and your suggestion of using coal as a new high value product is exactly the only solution to humanely ending the coal burning business. I have written essentially this same argument to the Governor and staff, but of course, have not heard from them. Using a much smaller amount of 20 cent coal to make significant amounts of these kinds of much higher value, more benign, products seems like it should be a no-brainer, but.... cheers, ken On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 6:45 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote: I wrote: 2. The total mass of coal needed to replace steel this would be much less than the mass of coal we now burn. I estimate it would be roughly 1/5th. World production of steel is 135 million tons per month or 1.620 billion tons per year . . . I realize that is a silly analysis. We are not going to replace every ton of steel with carbon filament. In many cases it would be a bad choice of materials. You would not want carbon filament manhole covers. Most of the steel we replace would be used in transportation, making automobiles, trucks and railroad trains. I do not know what fraction of total steel production that is. Forbes tells me automobile manufacturing consumes 12% of steel: http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2015/05/20/trends-in-steel-usage-in-the-automotive-industry/#65264c677865 So, let us say carbon replaces 30% of steel, including cars, railroad cars, bridges, and other applications that would benefit from a lightweight, stronger replacement for steel. To replace that much steel with an equivalent mass of coal (ignoring the fact that carbon fiber is lighter) it would take 6% of the mass of coal we now mine. That will not save the industry or preserve employment. - Jed
