White coal
dried chopped wood used as fuel
White coal is a form of fuel produced by drying chopped wood over a fire. It differs from charcoal which is carbonised wood. White coal was used in England to melt lead ore from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries. It produces more heat than green wood but less than charcoal and thus prevents the lead evaporating. White coal could be used mixed with charcoal for other industrial uses than lead smelting. White coal was produced in distinctive circular pits with a channel, known as Q-pits. They are frequently found in the woods of South Yorkshire.
Resources
Although traditionally made by drying chopped wood, white coal can be made from numerous waste products, most of which are formed into briquettes. Raw materials which can be used include:
Groundnut shells
Cotton hulls and stalks
Castor seed shells
Forest leaves; wood chips and shavings
Sugarcane bagasse
Rice husk and paddy straw
Mustard waste
Coir dust
Coffee husk
Sunflower waste
Maize stalks
Bajra (pearl millet) cobs
Sesame seeds oil cake
Wheat straw
Production
India
India is fast becoming a major manufacturer and consumer of white coal. A large number of companies have switched their boiler fuels to use white coal instead of fossil fuels.
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This entry incorporates text from “White coal” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.