Lecture 20 Summary and Notes

Some questions to ponder...

1. What are the differences between the source material for coal vs. petroleum in terms of the source of the source material and its relative C, H, and O.

2. Of the organic molecules, cellulose, lignin, cutin, suberin, and algaenen, plants are mostly____________.

3. Coal is classified according to rank. What are the ranks, how do they differ in terms of their composition (with regard to their carbon content and their volatile content), their physical characteristics, and their temperature and pressure (depth) of equilibration? For instance, how deep does bituminous coal need to be buried in order to form anthracite?

4. What are the compositional characteristics that are optimal for thermal coal? How do the compositional characteristics that are optimal for metallurgical coal differ?

5. As coal rank increases, what happens to the volume of natural gas generated, the pore space volume, and the tenancy for natural gas to segregate from the coal?

6. What are the major and minor elements present in coal? Which of those elements come from the plant material and which some from geologic material?

7. In general, what is the geographic and age distribution of world coal resources?

8. Is Saudi Arabia the Saudi Arabia of oil? Is the US the Saudi Arabia of coal? How does coal production in the US compare to production in China? How does the reserve life of China's reserves compare that of the US? Who is the Saudi Arabia of chicken?

Do not forget the homework assignment for Monday: Complete the following sentence:

_____________ is the Saudi Arabia of _________________.

submissions should be:
-true
-related to economic geology* (optional)
-not about any particular member of the W&L community
-G- or PG- rated
-submitted via email before 10 am Monday March 5th

5 point for completion with +1 for unique response 2 quiz points for peoples' choice (class vote) and 2 quiz points for critic's choice (my favorite).

Slides from today are up on Sakai. Monday, we will continue our discussion of coal with a look at coal mining trends in Appalachia. Your reading assignment for Monday will be Full cost accounting for the life cycle of coal by Epstein et al. (2011) in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. This is a longer article...