Australian Coal Association Australia's grid-connected electricity (brown coal around 24%) and is vital for major industries such as steel making and cement manufacture. On 23 August 2013, the Australian Coal Association released a statement that it will be subsumed into the Minerals Council of Australia. The Australian Coal Association acknowledges that 34 per cent of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions come from burning black and brown coal, primarily for the generation of electricity, but also for steel-making and cement manufacture. In 2003, the coal industry established the COAL21 initiative, bringing together the coal and electric power industries, unions, federal and state governments, and research
Coal gasification refiner wants to produce alkanes (i.e., hydrocarbons present in natural gas, gasoline, and diesel fuel), the coal gas is collected at this state and routed to a Fischer-Tropsch reactor. If, however, hydrogen is the desired end-product, the coal gas (primarily the CO product) undergoes the water gas shift reaction where more hydrogen is produced by additional reaction with water vapor: Although other technologies for coal gasification currently exist, all employ, in general, the same chemical processes. For low-grade coals (i.e., "brown coals") which contain significant amounts of water, there are technologies in which no steam is required during the reaction,