This Land Is Mined: The Coal Masterclass
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The History of Coal and Its Uses
If you're able to trap the gases that are driven off as you're cooking coal to turn it into coke in special structures called coke ovens, then you'll find that many of those gases burn. So clearly you're driving off something, and if you can capture that, then you have the earliest handy form of natural gas. The first synthetic dies came out of messing around experimenting with coal tar. Modern drug manufacturing is closely related to the die industry that came from coal tar.
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