This book is a direct outgrowth of classes that the authors gave over a period of three decades to a university audience taking a Mineral Beneficiation course as a major that included coal processing and utilization. It is designed to be used as a student’s (or layman’s) first introduction to coal processing and utilization, motivating the concepts before illustrating them by means of concrete situations. As such, this book gives an integrated overview of coal processing and utilization along with clean coal technology, presenting all the basic principles, theory and practice in a systematic way. Every topic covered is dealt with in a self-explanatory manner so that any new reader may find this book interesting and easy to understand.

The book makes available the hard core of fundamentals of coal processing and utilization in a form which is general enough to meet the needs of many and yet is unburdened by excess baggage best discussed in research journals. The salient feature is that all the technical terminology used in this book has been sufficiently explained in order to allow the
reader to understand the concepts effectively without needing to consult additional literature.

Problems are introduced not so much to be solved as to be tackled. Some of them are included to lay the ground work for the subsequent theory and will help the readers in teaching, research and operating plants. Overall, this book will be of interest to professionals and engineers in the fields of energy, mining, mineral, metallurgical and geological engineering, as well as to engineering geologists and earth sciences professionals.