Coal

Coal
Coal is one of our three fossils fuels and is very valuable and plentiful natural global resource.   Coal is formed from vegetation that has been acted upon by heat and pressure for millions of years that have produced coal seams.   Coal is much more plentiful then the other fossil fuels, oil and gas, with an estimated 112 years of coal remaining worldwide.   Coal is combustible and is made of mainly hydrogen, carbon and oxygen.  
The energy that we get from coal is energy that plants absorbed from the sun millions of years ago.   After a plant dies and starts to decay beneath the surface of the Earth it will start to release all of the stored energy that was inside of it.   The coal stops the process because it absorbs the energy before it tries to make it out of the ground.   Photosynthesis is what allows this whole process to take place.  
Coal is so important that we have a period of history that we dedicated to when coal started to form.   “Coal formation began during the Carboniferous Period - known as the first coal age - which spanned 360 million to 290 million years ago.”   During this time many of the swamps and peat bogs were buried due to the tectonic movements.   This is when heat and pressured caused vegetation to undergo a physical and chemical change into peat and then eventually coal.   The term used when changing from peat to coal is called Coalification.   Coalification is also what determines the ranking of the coal.   Ranking coal does not have much to it since they only rank coal by how much carbon is within the coal.  
Coal is broken down into two major groups known as the Low-ranks coal and the hard coal.   Low-rank coal is high in moisture content but low in the amount of carbon that is found in it.   Which also means that it gives off less energy.   Forty-seven percent of the worlds reserves are low-rank coals and it is broken down into two types of low ranks, Lignite and Sub-Bituminous.   Lignite has low organic maturity and is known as...