1: Valuable guide for those enterring the field
The high price of oil pretty much guarantees a renewed interest in "unconventional" sources of energy including coal, oil sands, and oil shale. The Canadians are doing a bang-up job with oil sands, and while the US has immense resources of oil shale, the real interest in the US for the foreseeable future will probably be expanded use of coal. This ensures recruitment of an entire new generation into the technology of coal, since most of us who worked this area 25 years ago have moved on to other things or retired or just moved on.
From James Speight comes a very handy resource for those entering the field, Handbook of Coal Analysis. This book is part of the Wiley Interscience series on Chemical Analysis; it is available on Amazon.
The book covers all manner of fundamental and operational analyses required in characterizing coal samples. Fundamental analyses are those like elemental analysis, called "Ultimate Analysis" in coal jargon; operational analyses are those like measurements of volatile matter and heat of combustion. All the information in this book can be found elsewhere, such as research papers and the ASTM standards series, but nowhere else is all of it bundled into one handy volume and nowhere else is the role and value of individual analyses explained so clearly.
For instance, I looked over the section on oxygen analysis, long a problem for coal chemists. In the past, most of the reported oxygen analyses were made by difference. Jim describes the various direct and indirect methods available and discusses pros and cons. Older references do not address these questions at all.
Full disclosure - Jim Speight is a long-time colleague of mine and we occasionally work together on projects. In addition, Jim arranged for the publisher to provide me a review copy of the book. That said, if I did not like the book, I would have kept my mouth shut and written no review. I do like it, as is obvious from my review.
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