I know Coal but ocasionaly I see Coke mentioned as a fuel
I have a vague memory of reading an article meant for boys that touted coke (fuel, not drink) as a fuel as there would be a lot less ash to clean out of the furnace. Anthracite was probably as clean and I’m guessing was more widely available.
As I understand it coke is a specialized heating fuel, mostly used in the steel industry. It burns much hotter than coal does and can damage furnaces not specifically built for its use.
Petcoke was used as a home heating fuel. Grandma’s house was heated with it and Dad told me that his brother-in-law, who worked at Standard Oil in Whiting, would arrange for a load to be delivered to her house as needed.
I grew up in a house that burned oil but I would find bits of coal in the yard where I suppose a coal chute was located. My brother said a big piece of coal (here he held his hands about a foot apart) would be worth fifty dollars! Woo, that was a lot of money to a 6 year old. I asked my father about that and he said fifty dollars would buy a couple of tons. No riches for me.
But here’s a funny thing I remember. On the oil tank in the basement was a float gauge that was a glass tube on top of the tank. Surrouding it was a red and yellow tin sign showing 1/4, 1/2 and full. I used to take those off and play with them, bending them and pretty much ruining them and then I would hide them. And every time I did that, another one would appear on the tank and the process would repeat. I was never asked about it, no one ever said anything about it and I was never punished for it.
My grandparents house had a coal furnace, which wasn’t converted to gas until my grandmother sold the house around 1968 or so. As a little boy I was fascinated by that coal furnace, I never played with it or even thought about doing so, but I was awestruck when Grandpa or Grandma opened the door to shovel coal into the furnace! Wow! What a sight! I didn’t see anything like that again until I took a cab tour of N&W 611 in 1992!
Some background here…On my last visit to Scranton PA I was doing research on the coal industry here from 1910-1970 something. The numbers are awsome–60,000,000-80,000,000 tons in a slow year. Most of it hand mined with pick and shovel by thounsands of miners living in coal patch towns. We only had about 30 Million people in the USA back then. So looking thru old city directorys i would come across “Joes Coal,Coke and Hardware store”. Since my IP I now realize that the “Coke” was used by farriers and farmers in there home blacksmith shops for making a repairing horse shoes. See next post
If I remember correctly, just the C&O moved 60M tons of coal in 1953 or so.
The B&O station at Lester, OH had a relatively large pot belly stove to heat the office area of the station. The company would load in a supply of coal every fall for the coming heating season - Lester was on the route of many coke trains headed to the steel mills of Cleveland - when cars are loaded to Full Visible Capacity - some coke can be dislodged from the heap that is above the hopper car side, as well as some hopper car pockets close more securely that others. There was always a supply of coke on the ground to be picked up and used to augment the coal when additional heat was needed - the stove grates didn’t last all that long.
Coke is coal that has had the volatiles roasted out of it, leaving almost pure carbon. This is desirable for forges and smokeless (but NOT carbon -monoxide-free) heat release. It is more expensive to make than typical coal heating fuel. Note that ‘metallurgical coal’ will likely be coked prior to actual use in steelmaking…
‘Petcoke’ is short for petroleum coke, a kind of byproduct of oil refining.
The coking process for converting bitumen/heavy oil into light synthetic crude produces large amounts of petroleum coke as a byproduct. CN is currently shipping unit trains of it from the Alberta oilsands to Prince Rupert.
Besides carbon, petcoke usually contains relatively high concentrations of impurities like heavy metals. This makes it unsuitable for use in steelmaking, but it can be burned as fuel just like coal.
Just be sure not to do so in modern superheated locomotives! Review the interesting history of high vanadium levels in oil-based fuel…
There is a gas station nearby that also sells home heating fuel. It’s callled Lambert’s. I’ve seen pictures of Lambert’s taken over 100 years ago. They sold coal, coke, coal oil and naptha. So, what’s coal oil? Like kerosene? So, if that’s a fuel, did any locomotives run on it? I’ve only seen it referenced in western movies where someone wants to burn down a building, like “they done put coal oil in the livery stable!”
“Coal oil” was literally distilled from coal, in this country it was marketed under the trade name “kerosene,” until petroleum based kerosene was developed.
Here’s the story…
There’s more to coal oil than I think Wikipedia tells. Look at the mid-19th-century history of “Paraffin” Young and his smokeless lamp oil for a little better understanding; there are other constituents than alkanes in the fractions that come off in the distillation of various coals.
Here is a flowchart of the production of petcoke; I hope Midland Mike will comment as necessary:
The ‘residual oil’ is our old friend Bunker C; the yield of petcoke after thermal cracking is somewhere in the range of 18 to 30% by weight of the residual feed.
The government apparently considers #5, the fuel of choice for classic reciprocating steam with von Boden-Ingles or Thomas-style burners, as being in the definition of ‘residual oil’ although whether a given refinery treats it as a feedstock for more valuable cracking or as a separate product may be a question for economics to determine.
I was more in the Exploration & Production end rather than refining. Michigan light crudes did not yield much petcoke. This changed once refineries started importing oil sands dilbit. A Detroit refinery started generating so much petcoke and storing it in piles besides the Detroit River, that it started blowing around into the river and neighborhoods, which got the attention of regulators. They finally moved the piles. Not sure where it went, but one early destination of petcoke was European power plants.
I grew up in one of three Federal Housing Projects (Greenbelt MD, Greenhills OH, & Greendale WI). Our home had a coal fired steam boiler in the basement and a coal bin. Fuel company would chute truck load of coal into the basement coal bin. Then mom would have to mop the basement to get the coal dust cleaned up. Depending on how bad the winter was, might take more than two refills to get through the winter. One year, my dad got a “deal” on a load of coke. Man, did that stuff burn hot. Had to change how you fired, (adjusted the dampers) the fire to avoid over heating the house. Later tried a load of fuel called “HAPPY PAK” which were paper wraped bricks of powdered coal and bound up oil that were easy to handle. no shoveling, just pick them up and throw in. Coal was a messy fuel, coal dust and ash to dispose of. No thermostatic control. At night, you had to bank the fire, then in the morning, you had to go down to the basement and open the dampers and shake the graThen an hour or so later, you woiuld need to reajust the dampers to suit the needs of the day. In 1950, the gov sold the village to the residents and my dad bought our unit. About a year later, we converted the boiler to oil. Village had no gas lines back then.
Speaking of coke burning hot…
Does anyone else remember a story in TRAINS about 20 or 30 years ago, I think in “In My Own Words”, by a fireman in a locomotive that was sitting idle next to a string of hoppers of coke? He decided to experiment with burning coke so he borrowed some of it and put it into the firebox. The boiler got so hot that the safety valves went off even with him opening everything he could and working the injector as fast as possible to inject cold water into the boiler. By the time it died down, some of the firebrick in the arch was actually melted.
This gets interesting fast, and miningman probably has considerable specific information at his disposal. Is this feedstock the ‘dilbit’ that has the asphaltenes removed? It sounds to me as if somebody is ‘diluting’ the very heavy ends (together with its clays and salts) and sending it out for ‘processing’ – something I find often ‘glossed over’ in discussion of tar-sands processing.
Incidentally, there appears to be a trend in the popular literature that says the composition of diluent is ‘proprietary’ and therefore dangerously unknown. Unless I’m badly mistaken, the stats provided for Enbridge CRW condensate blend
https://www.crudemonitor.ca/condensates/index.php?acr=CRW
are as reasonable an analysis as needed. (Note the residual sulfur component as mercaptans).
I have no current idea whether the degassing operations on American light crude (to suit it for railroad transportation) provide a useful source for some of the light fractions used in diluent. It certainly appears that considerable dilbit/synbit is needed to admix with typical United States shale oil to suit it for ‘conventional’ refining, although where substantial amounts of ‘useless’ petcoke would come from in that feedstream is not entirely clear to me.