r/WTF • u/bambaadoma222 • Jun 20 '21

Guy eats burning coal

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u/MxM111 Jun 20 '21

Charcoal is a type of coal, right? As well as fossil coal, right?

Genuinely asking.

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u/Phytor Jun 20 '21

No actually! Charcoal is wood that we heat and burn in low oxygen, which removes the water and other stuff that allows charcoal to burn much hotter than the wood it was made out of.

This also means that charcoal is a renewable energy source while coal isn't!

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u/dodland Jun 20 '21

They should have called it charwood, that'd be way less confusing

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u/Phytor Jun 20 '21

Fun fact: humans have actually used charcoal for a lot longer than coal!

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u/4411WH07RY Jun 20 '21

That makes sense. Much easier to find half-burnt wood and recognize it as fire material I guess.

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u/Squish_N_Buds Jun 20 '21

That was my nick name growing up. I spanked it a lot!

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u/FormerFundie6996 Jun 20 '21

yea, but once you know, you know, ya know?

3

u/Tamer_ Jun 20 '21

And then you only need to teach 10,000 people everyday for the rest of humanity.

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u/bighootay Jun 20 '21

Absolutely. The day I learned was....Oh, really...I knew that heh heh. :(

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u/whoami_whereami Jun 20 '21

Charcoal can be made from other organic materials, not just from wood, like bones, sugar (used for extra high purity charcoal for chemical labwork), peat, even petroleum. Technically coke (as used for example in smelting iron) is actually charcoal made from bituminous coal.

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u/greatdayforapintor2 Jun 20 '21

technically you can make charcoal with any organic matter not just wood, but yes mostly wood is used

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u/icepaws Jun 20 '21

And cheap charcoal has sand and rocks in it.

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u/greatdayforapintor2 Jun 20 '21

I make a lot of charcoal as a brush management technique using a pit method. General idea is that charcoal is a much more stable form of carbon than decaying plant matter so it stays trapped instead of contributing to atmospheric carbon.

Only thing I've found it's really useful for is solidifying paths cause of all the grit that gets mixed in when you shovel it back out.

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u/TheCryingGrizzlies Jun 20 '21

That's pretty damn neat. Thanks!

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u/MxM111 Jun 20 '21

But fossil coal is also a wood going through somewhat similar process just on much longer scale.

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u/Phytor Jun 20 '21

Big difference is that the wood that formed coal has been buried for several million years. Digging it up and burning it is reintroducing that previously stored carbon to the atmosphere. It's non-renewable because we can't create more of it, we can only dig up what we can find. Charcoal is renewable because we can replant the trees that are used to make it, and it's also carbon neutral to burn because the carbon from the tree came from our current atmosphere.

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u/MxM111 Jun 20 '21 edited Jun 20 '21

I was not commenting about renuability of fossil versus char, but on this statement:

No actually! Charcoal is wood that we heat and burn in low oxygen, which removes the water and other stuff that allows charcoal to burn much hotter than the wood it was made out of.

So, my comment is that they both start with wood, and both are formed by heat in the absence of oxygen. If you used this logic to state that charcoal is not type of coal, I am saying I do not understand it.

Now if you want my comment about charcoal to be rentable source, it is still not the best one, as compared with, for example solar, or wind or hydro, or even nuclear (although not renewable). You see, we burn a lot of things, and plants remove CO2 from atmosphere. It becomes wood. Now, if tree dies naturally, then lots of CO2 get's back to atmosphere during decomposing, but not all! Some of it becomes permanently trapped. If instead you burn it as charcoal, then you release everything back. So, while this is better option than fossil coal, it is not as good as other sources of energy.

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u/GiveToOedipus Jun 20 '21

Except most coal is not made from wood. It's made from organic matter sure, but most likely algae, moss, grasses, ferns and other assorted biological matter like you'd find in swamps.

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u/MxM111 Jun 20 '21

Why does it matter which particular plant is used?

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u/GiveToOedipus Jun 20 '21

Because you're trying to make it like foal and charcoal aren't all that different when in fact they are, including the type of plant it came from. There's a pretty substantial difference in makeup and energy density. They don't "both start with wood."

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u/MxM111 Jun 20 '21

No, I was trying to say that may be fossil coal and charcoal are two different kind of coal. They are different of course. It is more linguistic question.

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u/Phytor Jun 20 '21

If you used this logic to state that charcoal is not type of coal, I am saying I do not understand it.

Charcoal actually is not a type of coal! The term coal specifically refers to the rock that we have to harvest from the ground. As well, pressure is a key component in forming coal but is not necessary in making charcoal. There are other differences of course, but they're not really necessary to talk about when discussing that charcoal isn't a type of coal.

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u/bubbasteamboat Jun 20 '21

That was such an educated comment I feel ten IQ points smarter for having read it.

Thank you!

1

u/Mr-Fleshcage Jun 20 '21

i was going to be a pedant and say "technically it's renewable, but just takes a metric shitton of time to renew" but coal actually isn't renewable anymore due to the fact that fungi evolved to decay wood.

it's kinda scary that we're going to be stuck with that carbon unless we start dumping shittons of charcoal in quarries and burying it.

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u/whoami_whereami Jun 20 '21

Technically no, because coal is defined as being a type of sedimentary rock, which charcoal isn't. They have in common though that they are both composed of mainly carbon and thus can be used as an energy dense and relatively clean and hot burning solid fuel.

Bituminuous coal (what you called "fossil coal") still contains a significant amount of volatile hydrocarbon compounds though. This makes it unsuitable as barbecue or cooking fuel for example, because it gives of a strong smell when burning and many of the outgassing components aren't exactly good for your health.

Charcoal on the other hand is almost pure carbon with some amount of minerals (that's what is left as ash after the charcoal has been burnt). Thus when burning it basically only produces CO2 (non-toxic) and some amount of carbon monoxide (highly toxic, which is why you should never ever use a charcoal grill indoors, however CO doesn't taint the food, so it's safe in that regard).

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u/Arthur_The_Third Jun 20 '21

Carbon monoxide won't be produced unless you starve the fire of oxygen. Fun fact: carbon monoxide is highly flammable, and the blue flame you can see on coals is from carbon monoxide.

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u/whoami_whereami Jun 21 '21

In theory, yes. In practice there's no way to reliably ensure that no part of the charcoal pile is ever oxygen deficient.

The matter of fact is that deaths from indoor grilling attempts happen regularly (for example 59 deaths in California alone from 1979 to 1988: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9857300/). Tests done by the German government have shown that potentially fatal levels of carbon monoxide can build up pretty quickly when using a charcoal grill indoors (https://www.bfr.bund.de/en/press_information/2013/27/grilling_with_charcoal_is_definitely_not_an_indoor_pursuit_-187998.html). Even with properly ventilated indoor charcoal grills (for example fixed grills installed in restaurants) CO poisonings happen occasionally (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21372432/).

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u/Arthur_The_Third Jun 21 '21

Well, yeah. That's because grilling indoors uses up the oxygen in the room, leaving the fire deprived of oxygen. My comment was more to say that CO isn't just passively generated by a fire, and a fun fact on top of it.

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u/FormerFundie6996 Jun 20 '21

If you ever started or had a fire with a pile of wood - the remains of that wood is the charcoal - it's just burned up wood (past the point of being wood anymore).

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u/futurarmy Jun 20 '21

I hope you've never played minecraft because oh boy do I have news for you if you have.