FRACTIONATION OF WYOMING COALS TO PRODUCE INTERMEDIATES FOR NON-FUEL PRODUCTS

摘要

Coal production in the United States is falling due to competition in the electric utility market from natural gas and renewable energy. To continue to derive economic benefits from Wyoming’s abundant coal reserves, we are exploring alternative markets. Non-fuel products are attractive, because, compared to electricity and fuels, non-fuel products have high unit values that may allow coal processing to be economically viable. Potential non-fuel products include paving materials, soil supplements, aromatic chemicals, polymers, and carbon products (activated carbon, carbon fiber, graphite, and graphene).rnThe State of Wyoming is sponsoring a Carbon Initiative to seek new markets for Wyoming coal. A key concept in this initiative is the “coal refinery.” Much like a petroleum refinery, the process would fractionate the raw material, coal in this case instead of crude oil, and the fractions would be processed to make final products. This presentation describes our efforts to fractionate coal.rnOur coal fractionation research is taking two basic approaches. The first approach is solvent extraction, in which a portion of the coal is dissolved in either an organic solvent or in an alkaline aqueous solution. We have also started to investigate flash pyrolysis in which the feed to pyrolysis will be either raw coal or the insoluble residue from solvent extraction.