The system creates useable fuel from discarded waste and could be used to clean up the hundreds of coal-waste impoundments throughout the Appalachian mountains.
The separation system will be installed near Pineville, West Virginia, at a Pinnacle Mining Company property.
The system uses two processes: one produces clean coal by separating impurities (clays, silica and pyrite) from waste coal; the other separates water from the cleaned coal.
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Beard Technologies, and the Energy Department’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) developed the two-step separation system under NETL’s Solid Fuels and Feedstocks Program, aiming to reduce the high cost of processing fine coal.
Beard Technologies planned to use the advanced separation system to produce 240,000 tons per annum of clean coal from waste coal in the impoundment.
The Energy Department estimated 30–50 million tons of coal fines were discarded annually into impoundments, adding to the more than 2 billion tons of coal already in about 700 fine coal impoundments, mostly in central Appalachia.
