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"Coal" is a dirty word these days, but the actual physical stuff is quite beautiful, especially the hard dense, packed kind, anthracite. One of the things you learn as a steel town kid is all sorts of random shit about coal.
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And earlier, this nice wee haul of sea-coal, beachcombed out of the scatter-line at the high-water mark. (Explanation: twitter.com/Mikeachim/stat)
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steel plants mostly use bituminous coal that's processed into coke in ovens... which is kinda like artificially made anthracite in a way (purified etc) but not as beautiful
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carbon is amazing shit... one of the issues with "decarbonize" as a term for climate stuff is that you can't actually decarbonize materials and shouldn't want to. It's everywhere and in everything. Including our bodies. It's CO2 emissions that are the issue, not carbon.
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I strongly suspect most people have never actually seen mineral coal in the US. Most people have only seen charcoal briquettes, which are made from wood. Coal is not at all the same thing. It's a rock! Ranges in consistency from hard and heavy to powdery and airy)
graphite is also very cool, especially the larger art-pencil type things.. I have one somewhere, about a quarter inch square cross section
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