subject: Coal Chemical Industry [print this page] Coal Chemical Industry Coal Chemical Industry
Coal chemical industry is the industry which produces various chemical products by changing coal into gas fuel, liquid fuel, solid fuel and chemicals through chemical processing. Coal chemical industry includes primary chemical processing, secondary chemical processing and deep chemical processing of coal. Different kinds of coal processing such as carbonization, gasification, liquefaction, synthetic gas chemical engineering all belong to coal chemical industry. As the petroleum resource in the world is becoming less and less, coal chemical industry has broad and bright development potential.
Among all the production technologies of coal chemical industry, coke making is the earliest one in application. It is still am important component of coal chemical industry today. Coal gasification plays an important role in coal chemical industry which can be used to produce various fuel gases. It can not be denied that coal gasification improves quality of people's life and protects the environment by producing clean fuel gases. Synthetic gases produced by coal gasification are raw materials for synthetic liquid fuel and some other products. Direct coal liquefaction can produce artificial petroleum and chemical products. When petroleum shortage appears, coal's liquefaction products can replace natural petroleum. All these mentioned above are the main manifestation of coal chemical industry's transformation.
The birth of coal chemical industry first appeared in the late 18th century and in 19th century the complete system of coal chemical industry was set up. After entering 20th century, raw materials of organic chemicals were changed into coal from the former agricultural and forestry products, and then coal chemical industry became an important part of chemical industry. After world war two, petrochemical industry got rapid development, which weakened the position taken up by coal chemical industry by changing raw materials from coal to petroleum and natural gas. The organic matters and chemical structures of coal with condensed rings as their core units connected by bridged bonds can transform coal into various fuels and chemical products through hot working and catalytic processing. Coal carbonization is the earliest and most important method. Coal carbonization is mainly used to produce cokes for metallurgy and some secondary products like coal gas, benzene, methylbenzene, etc. Coal gasification takes up an important position in chemical industry. City gas and varieties of fuel gases can be produced by coal gasification. The common role of low-temperature carbonization, direct coal liquefaction and indirect coal liquefaction is to produce liquid fuels.
Coal chemical technologies of the new generation are the techniques for coal clean utilization to synthesize and obtain various chemical products and fuel oil with coal gasification as a leader and one-carbon chemical technology as the base. The cooperation of new coal chemical technology with electric heating can realize the aim that coal can be used efficiently with lowest coat and least pollution in its life cycle. Coal chemical industry will play an important role in China's sustainable utilization of energy resources. It is significant for China to develop coal chemical industry which can extremely reduce environmental pollution and dependency on imported petroleum. So it is can be said that coal chemical industry has great market demand and development opportunity in China.
