Inventor Claims To Have Developed ‘Super Clean’ Coal

LEBANON, Va. – Every few minutes, Richard Wolfe poked his gloved hands into coal dust to remove a block from a pottery kiln’s viewport so he could peer at the metal 55-gallon drum inside.
A steady whoosh of 1,300-degree flames engulfed the weathered drum and its contents, the ingredients for what the scientist called “super clean” coal.
“What we’re doing is taking the coal apart and putting it back better than it was naturally,” he told his audience of four coal industry insiders who met with him on a recent Saturday in a dusty barn in Lebanon, Va.
Wolfe, the son of a West Virginia coal miner and a former Abingdon-based coal researcher now residing in North Carolina, calls the end result “carbonite,” a glossy chunk of rock that looks more like a burned brownie than coal.
He said it burns hotter than coal and can power generators that make electricity, but without spewing as much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the air as regular coal.
The same chunk also could be used in the steel industry, home heating or even water purification.
Simply put, carbonite is the combination of two types of coals heated at high temperatures with a secret catalyst. Wolfe declined to name the catalyst because he intends to patent both the process and the product.
It’s Wolfe’s environmentally friendly answer to today’s skyrocketing oil prices.
Last year, United Nations scientists concluded that greenhouse emissions have to be cut in half by 2050 to avoid a worldwide temperature rise. Wolfe said his product could go toward cutting those emissions.
The byproduct of Wolfe’s kiln-based cooking process is methane gas, the main ingredient for natural gas, which often is used to fire steam boilers at electric plants. The orange-yellow methane gas could be seen through the kiln viewport rising from the drum after less than an hour into the burning process.
It’s one byproduct that can be scraped from carbonite for resale.
Gas to power cars and oil – just like the black gold shipped from the Middle East –  can be extracted from the carbonite. After all, oil eventually becomes coal, Wolfe explained. What sets carbonite apart is that it produces 25 percent less carbon dioxide than natural coal, half as much sulphur dioxide and no mercury.
The gas and oil are two more byproducts to squeeze from Wolfe’s invention. And all of carbonite’s ingredients can be found in Southwest Virginia and other parts of America.
Wolfe, who runs Wolfe Engineering and Consultants in Banner Elk, N.C., researched and perfected the process in labs at West Virginia University over the last two years. He often races from his home and business in North Carolina to business contacts in West Virginia and Southwest Virginia, and sometimes shoots to Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, where he conducts more coal research and consultation.
The right temperatures, burn times and the catalyst were all worked out behind closed university doors.
The final demonstration took place in less-controlled conditions – on an overcast Saturday in May – inside a dusty metal barn once used to manufacture pottery. This is where Wolfe hoped to usher in a new energy age.
The industry insiders who saw the demonstration admit they’ve never seen or heard of anything similar.
“It looks to me like it would have some promise,” Harry Childress, of Cumberland Resources Corp. in Wise County, Va., said in a later telephone interview.
Skepticism and surprise
Though Wolfe’s new creation impressed the audience, news of carbonite elicited only questions from others.
“I’ve never heard of someone scrubbing coal of carbon dioxide,” said Alice McKeown of the environmental group Sierra Club. “I’m a bit skeptical on that part.”
The technology to capture and then store – called sequestration – most of the carbon-dioxide byproduct of burning coal is in the research stages. According to theory, the capture happens after the coal is burned, not before, as is supposed to be the case with carbonite.
Some companies already capture carbon dioxide on a limited scale. Once captured, the byproduct is pumped into already tapped oil fields to force to the surface the last remaining drops of oil.
From an anti-pollution standpoint, wide-scale use of experimental carbon dioxide capture equipment at large coal-burning plants might be too expensive, experts said. Also, whether captured carbon dioxide would remain in underground wells or in the deep sea without escape or disaster remains a scientific mystery.
“It has promise for the future, but it’s not here today,” McKeown said.
For all anyone knows, Wolfe is the first person to scrub any amount of carbon dioxide from coal before it is shipped to the customer.
Internet searches show that Wolfe, who combines a lifetime of coal expertise with a doctorate in nuclear engineering, long has toiled to solve energy problems.
In Russia, he learned how to recycle the waste from burned coal, according to the Web site of Lees-McRae College in Banner Elk, N.C.
Banner Elk is where Wolfe now lives and runs a vineyard, a trade he learned from the Italian miners who settled in West Virginia’s coal country.
Wolfe said his current international adventure includes advising South Africa on ways to reduce the emissions from the coal used there every day to cook meals and warm houses.
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy, tasked with tracking new technologies in coal and other energy fields, know of Wolfe and his works. He worked there in the 1970s.
What was news to the DOE scientists is the notion of carbon dioxide levels being cut before the coal was burned, said Joe Culver, DOE spokesman.
DOE scientist Tom Feeley noted that the energy world is filled with independent scientists racing to patent the next answer to pollution. Most of them keep quiet about what they have and are like poker players “holding their cards close to the vest” so they win the patent game, Feeley said.
Old meets new
It’s no secret that gasoline can be extracted from coal. The process, called the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, was developed in the 1920s in Germany, a country poor in petroleum but rich in coal.
In fact, the conversion process fueled Adolf Hitler’s tanks and planes during World War II.
During apartheid, South Africa overcame fuel embargoes by using the Fischer-Tropsch method.
Oil also can be extracted from coal. In fact, oil extraction is the first step toward producing diesel fuel and then gas.
“Coal is oil before it becomes coal,” Wolfe said. “We [the United States] have more coal than Saudi Arabia has oil.”
Most of America’s power plants are fueled by coal.
To overcome constantly spiking gas prices, some states have been forced to rethink energy practices.
Officials in Montana hope a public-private partnership based on the Fischer-Tropsch process is the answer, according to the Billings Gazette newspaper.
China is banking on a coal-to-oil process to be its energy savior, according to the Xinhua News Agency.
The difference with carbonite is the pollution levels – it would be drastically lower than if regular coal was used, Wolfe promises.
But a 25 percent drop in carbon dioxide levels left the Sierra Club’s McKeown unimpressed.
“Twenty five percent is just a drop in the bucket,” she said.
Wolfe disagrees. To him, it’s a large improvement over what exists. His experiment is just the first step toward a new revolution, he says.
The only problem, he said, is finding a financial backer. It might not be an easy obstacle to overcome.
Squeezing gas and oil from coal can be a pricey proposition. The math makes sense only if oil prices rise beyond break-even costs of the gas-from-coal process. It means oil has to cost more than $50 per barrel. The price neared $135 per barrel on Friday and is expected to hit $150 by July 4, according to The Associated Press.
“It’s really tied to the price of oil,” DOE scientist Tom Feeley said. “If [oil prices] come back down, then that’s the risk you take ... you may have lost your market.”
Coal remains a winning solution only if oil prices continue to rise.
America once considered coal to be the light at the end of its tunnel. The federal government funded coal-to-gas research nearly 30 years ago, but backed out after oil prices began to drop.
Wolfe thinks carbonite can beat the odds simply because it can be used in manufacturing steel and in other industries as well as in the energy game. It’s still a money-maker even if oil prices suddenly drop, he said.
“We have the technology. We just need the resolve” to commercialize carbonite and create an independent America, Wolfe said.

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