There are no documented records of when or how mankind first discovered that a certain
"black rock" would burn. However, it is known that coal was employed as a fuel in China circa
1100 BC and that Welsh Bronze Age cultures had used coal for funeral pyres. There are many other instances where coal receives some mention in the historical literature, but the consistent use of coal is believed to have evolved in England in the Middle Ages, later becoming the prime force behind the Industrial Revolution. From that point until the early decades of the twentieth century, coal has emerged as a major source of energy. However, the subsequent emergence of petroleum as a plentiful and cheap source of energy led to the "demotion" of coal to a "mere" source of combus• tible energy (into which the use of petroleum was steadily making inroads). Nevertheless, recent energy crises have served to emphasize that petroleum would no longer remain the cheap com• modity to which mankind has grown accustomed. Indeed, assessments of the availability of petro• leum have indicated that supplies of the more conventional crude oils could be virtually exhausted within the foreseeable future. This, coupled with the drastic increases in the price of the available petroleum, has caused a major shift in the emphasis of energy policies. As a result, there has been an "outburst" of serious attempts to produce liquid fuels from the so-called unconventional sources such as coal, oil sands (often referred to as tar sands or bituminous sands), and oil shale. Indeed, this re-emphasis of the value of these unconventional liquid fuel sources has helped reinstate coal to its once-enjoyed popularity and, perhaps, to a leading (even unique) position of being a major source of energy. In fact, power generation-once the sole domain of coal but since intruded upon by the shift to oil-fired generating plants-may also be returned to coal as the predominant source of combustible energy. Thus, it came about during the winter of 1976-1977 that the author was instrumental in initiating (with a colleague, John F. Fryer) a teaching course relating to the chem• istry and technology of coal that ran parallel with the course relating to the chemistry and technol•
ogy of petroleum, both of which were offered through the Faculty of Extension at the University of
Alberta. The courses ran for several years and were also offered in the shortened multiday format through the Faculty of Continuing Education at the University of Calgary. This book is the result of the copious notes collected and employed for the course and is intended to be a companion volume to The Chemistry and Technology of Petroleum (James G. Speight, Marcel Dekker, Inc., 1980). The book introduces the reader to the science of coal, beginning with the formation of coal in the ground and progresses through the various chemical and analytical aspects of coal science to the established and proposed processes for the production of a variety of gaseous and liquid fuels. These latter aspects of coal technology are actually quite complex insofar as the technology is still evolving. Thus, processes that were of major interest at, say, manuscript preparation may, at the time of manuscript publication, no longer be in contention as a serious process option.

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