Pittsburgh Seam bituminous coal

HIGH SULFUR BITUMINOUS COAL - PITTSBURGH SEAM... 

Bruceton bituminous, a Pittsburgh Seam coal was used in the experiment. The chemical analyses of coal is given in Table I. The coal was dried in vacuum 343 K prior to use and stored in glass containers under nitrogen. 

It is estimated that approximately 0.9 to 2.1 m of reasonably compacted plant material was required to form 0.3 m of bituminous coal. Uifferent ranks of coal require different amounts of time. It has been estimated that the time required for deposition of peat sufficient to provide 0.3 m of the various ranks of coal was lignite, 160 years bituminous coal, 260 years and anthracite, 490 years. Another estimate indicates that a 2.4 m bed of Pittsburgh Seam (bituminous) coal required about 2,100 years for the deposition of necessaiy peat, while an anthracite bed with a thickness of 9.1 m required about 15,000 years. 

Samples Preparation. The coal liquids were derived from the catalytic liquefaction of Pittsburgh Seam bituminous and Wyoming sub-bituminous coals. The analysis of these coals is given in Table I. The coals were liquefied in a bench-scale catalytic unit using cyclone overhead product as recycle solvent to insure that the liquid products were derived from the coal and not the solvent. The product streams from... 

The present paper presents batch autoclave data on the direct hydrocracking of a single sub-bituminous coal from the Powder River basin of southeastern Montana. Comparative data were also obtained with the Pittsburgh Seam bituminous coal that was used in the previous work (I). Data on the regeneration of simulated spent melts from such an operation are also given in a continuous bench-scale, fluidized-bed combustion unit. 

The Pittsburgh Seam (No. 8) Bituminous coal is from the Ireland Mine of the Consolidation Coal Company. 

Four coals were selected for process evaluation whose sulfur form distribution is typical of coals east of the Mississippi River and which represent major U.S. coal beds Pittsburgh, Lower Kittanning, Illinois No 5, and Herrin No. 6. The Pittsburgh bed has been described as the most valuable individual mineral deposit in the United States and perhaps in the world. Its production accounts for approximately 35%. of the total cumulative production of the Appalachian bituminous coal basin to January 1, 1965 and 21% of the total cumulative production of the United States to that date (5). The Lower Sattanning bed together with its correlative beds contains even larger reserves than the Pittsburgh seam. The No. 5 bed is the most widespread and commercially valuable coal bed in... 

Carbonization. When coal is heated to temperatures 900 to 1200°C in the absence of air, most of the volatile matter is driven off, leaving a char, or, in the case of metallurgical bituminous coal, a coke. The atmosphere in a coke oven consists principally of hydrogen and methane. Consequently, pyrite is reduced to a mixture of iron sulfide (troilite and pyrrhotite) and iron metal [ ]. The amount of iron metal formed depends on both the temperature and the composition of the coke-oven gas. The reduction of iron sulfide to iron metal is desirable since blast furnace operation is more efficient with low sulfur coke. Calcite reacts with the liberated sulfur to form calcium sulfate, thus retaining sulfur in the coke. Calcium XANES spectra of coke produced from Pittsburgh seam coal in which all calcium is initially present as calcite indicate that approximately 70 percent of the calcite is converted to calcium sulfate during coking. 

High ranked bituminous coals like those of the Pittsburgh seam contain a distribution of discrete mineral matter particles in the size range from 50 to 1 pm which can be released and physically separated from the coal by normal fracture mechanisms experienced in wet ball milling. Separation of the product coal from the mineral matter dispersed in water was achieved by agglomeration methods. 

Of the coals to be studied in this project, attention was focused on high volatile bituminous coal. Most of the work was devoted to Pittsburgh No. 8 seam coal from Ireland mine, with some tests on Ohio No. 6 seam coal from Broken Arrow mine and a highly volatile West Virginia No. 5 block coal. Proximate and ultimate analyses of these are given in Table I. Typical run data and product analyses are shown in Table II. 

Figure 4. Approach to carbon-hydrogen reaction equilibrium for pretreated Pittsburgh seam bituminous coal...

All experiments used chars supplied by the Institute of Gas Technology. Char A was hydrogen-pretreated Pittsburgh Seam, Ireland Mine bituminous coal. Char B was also prepared from a Pittsburgh Seam, Ireland Mine coal pretreated (about 1 ft3 of oxygen/lb of fresh coal at... 

Figure 30. FTIR spectra of tars from a Pittsburgh seam bituminous coal (PSOC 170). Tars from 10 s vacuum pyrolysis at the indicated temperature.

Recently, Contos et al. (50) and McCandless and Contos (51) have made a comprehensive assessment of the economics of the major chemical coal cleaning processes. Since pilot plant data were not available for most processes, the costs were based on preliminary conceptual designs. Taking bituminous coal from the Pittsburgh seam as a representative coal (which contained 1.93 wt% total sulfur, about 66% of which was pyritic sulfur), capital and operating costs for a feed rate of 7,200 metric ton/day plant were evaluated based on the first quarter of 1977 prices. A brief summary of their study is shown in Table 2. 

Interferon induction by influenza virus in monkey kidney (LLC-MKj) cell monolayers pre-treated with coal dust was inhibited in relation to coal rank (Hahon 1983). Maximal inhibition of viral interferon induction was noted with high rank coal and the degression of this activity was related to coal s position in the carboniferous series anthracite, bituminous, subbituminous, lignite, and peat. Adsorption of poly(4-vinylpyridine-M-oxide) to bituminous coal dust from the Pittsburgh seam, Cambria County, Pa., not only occurred at a more rapid rate than to cell monolayers, but also less polymer was required to pretreat coal dust than cell mono-layers to achieve comparable amelioration of interferon production (Hahon 1976). 

Where MVY is maximum volatile yield (percent), and VMpj is volatile matter measured in a standard proximate analysis. The r for this equation is 0.945, over a suite of 10 fuels ranging from fresh sawdust to petroleum coke and including lignite, PRB, western bituminous, Illinois basin, and Pittsburgh seam coals. Using this equation the maximum... 

For the process study, nine coals ranging in rank from low volatile bituminous to lignite have been selected. Of these, high volatile strongly caking coal from the Pittsburgh No. 8 seam was selected for the initial and most extensive hydrogasification study because it was expected to be the most difficult to process. The work reported here is limited to this coal. 

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