[DoctorBeaver]

I remember when I was but a kit we had open hearth fires at home (the nearest we got to central heating was stuffing granny under the floorboards). Sometimes we would use coal, sometimes coke, and sometimes anthracite. There's an open fire where I live now and we get our coal in nice little bags from the local garage. But all they have is coal. No coke or anthracite.

So, what is the difference between them and can you still get coke & anthracite?

[DoctorBeaver]

I wonder if this would be better placed in Geology 

[lightarrow]

I remember when I was but a kit we had open hearth fires at home (the nearest we got to central heating was stuffing granny under the floorboards). Sometimes we would use coal, sometimes coke, and sometimes anthracite. There's an open fire where I live now and we get our coal in nice little bags from the local garage. But all they have is coal. No coke or anthracite.

So, what is the difference between them and can you still get coke & anthracite?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal

[DoctorBeaver]

I should have made it clearer that what I was asking is what is the difference between using the different types as fuel for an open fire.

[RD]

Coke and anthracite are smokeless fuels, some types of coal are not smokeless.

Spotted this photo of a Chinese coal delivery...



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China


I bet this coalman eats three shredded wheat for breakfast. 

[DoctorBeaver]

I wonder why they bother shaping it

[RD]

Households in China's urban area have used crude coal for domestic use, but since mid-seventies we gradually shifted to honeycomb briquette which gives much higher heat efficiency, reducing consumption and cutting pollution.

http://www.hedon.info/BP19:CoalBriquetteTechnologyFromChina

"Honeycomb briquettes", so maybe this load of coal is not quite as heavy as it looks.

[DoctorBeaver]

Interesting

[RD]

Households in China's urban area have used crude coal for domestic use, but since mid-seventies we gradually shifted to honeycomb briquette which gives much higher heat efficiency, reducing consumption and cutting pollution.

http://www.hedon.info/BP19:CoalBriquetteTechnologyFromChina

The Chinese were big on uniformity in the 1970's, e.g. the chairman Mao suit.
The briquettes would be a way of homogenising the coal so everyone got the same quantity and quality.

[blakestyger]

The briquettes are formed from coal dust as, I believe, was Anthracite and probably Phurnacite and Ancit.

I use something similar to get our open fire up to heat - then we burn logs for the rest of the evening.

The solid fuel we have is 'Homefire' - smokeless, hexagonal briquettes that come in 20kg bags and we burn about 2/month; there is no waste and little mineral ash.

[I liked the Chinese delivery - it must have been a Tuesday!]

As no-one has mentioned it yet, coke was a by-product of the old gas-works that towns had before natural methane replaced it.
The gas was produced by distilling coal and separating the products: gas, tar oil and coke (which still had a relatively high calorific value).
The tar oil would be further distilled in a fractionating tower to produce fine chemicals such as naphthalene, pyridine etc down to the heavier fractions and heavy oils like creosote. The final product would be coal tar that was used for road building.
As a chemistry student I was shown around one of these places in Scunthorpe - as I was working in sugar manufacture the differences were amazing.

[lyner]

My dad used to collect coke, free of charge, from the Plymouth Gasworks. He had to take his own sacks, though.
This was in the early nineteen fifties.

[Madidus_Scientia]

I'm alien to all this, where I come from it would be daft to heat a house, and coke is something we drink along with a bit of rum. What do you mean by coke?

[blakestyger]

The gas was produced by distilling coal and separating the products: gas, tar oil and coke (which still had a relatively high calorific value).

Coke is hard and cinder-like, but is mostly carbon and mineral as it is essentially the coal without its gases and oils.

Australia is/or was known for its brown coal deposits that are open cast mined - what do you use that for?

[Madidus_Scientia]

Brown coal is found in Victoria and South Australia, and is of lower quality due a higher ash and water content. As a result Victoria adopted German power station and briquette technology in the 1920s to utilize the brown coal reserves of the Latrobe Valley. Today there are three open cut brown coal mines in Victoria used for baseload power generation. Burning brown coal has 3 times the greenhouse gas emissions as natural gas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_Australia

Basically we have a ****load of coal and what we don't use for our own power generation we export. Unfortunately we have no nuclear power stations which is a shame for the environment.