Virginia Tech and the DOE signed an agreement for the continuation of on-going research at Virginia Tech and West Virginia University. Total funding is $11 million for three years, which includes $8.8 million of federal funds and $2.2 million of cost sharing from CAST.

CAST is a seven- university consortium, with Virginia Tech and West Virginia University serving as the lead institutions. The other universities participating in the consortium are University of Kentucky, Montana Tech, University of Nevada-Reno, New Mexico Tech, and University of Utah.

The original research started in September 2001 under a similar Cooperative Agreement with the Department of Energy at a total project cost of $2.35 million. One outcome of this investment was the development of a flotation process, known as microbubble flotation, now widely used around the world.

At an October press conference to announce the deal, congressman Rick Boucher, said the new research money will be used to develop advanced separation technologies for cleaning coal more efficiently. The availability of these technologies will allow the mined coal to be used more fully and cleanly for power generation he said.

“Of the various technological needs of the U.S. coal industry, developing better methods of processing fine coal may be the most important,” Boucher said.

“In the absence of appropriate technologies, many companies are forced to discard the portion of mined coal that is too fine to be cleaned efficiently. According to a recent report published by National Research Council (NRC), the U.S. coal industry discards 70 to 90 million tons of fine coal annually. Where does the fine coal go? It goes to impoundments along with water.”

The NRC report said there were 713 active impoundments, mostly located in Central Appalachia, which are environmental concerns. It is estimated that 2.5 billion tons of fine coal has been discarded in numerous impoundments in the U.S.

CAST has made recent progress on solving the fine coal dewatering problem. In one approach, novel chemical additives are used to facilitate vacuum filtration. In another, a method of facilitating centrifugal filtration has been developed. The first of these approaches is being developed commercially by Beard Technologies of Pittsburgh (see related article, link on left.)

“The advantage of doing research as a consortium is to create synergies using the different expertise available at the participating universities. CAST aims to develop crosscutting separation technologies that can be used by both the coal and mineral industries,” Boucher said.