West Virginia Executive Spring/Summer 2020 | Page 39

The Next
Generation
of Coal
KATLIN SWISHER, PH.D.
Photo by Touchstone Research Laboratories.
As the rise and fall in the demand for
coal continues for established uses like
power generation, one West Virginia-based
company is developing innovative applications
for the state’s most prominent export.
Because coal is a hydrocarbon with unique
properties, it can easily be converted to a
wide range of products, and Wheelingbased
Touchstone Research Laboratories
is committed to finding alternative uses
for coal in research, manufacturing and
commercialization.
“The coal industry has done a really
good job controlling quality,” says owner
and CEO Brian Joseph, who founded
the company in 1980 immediately after
college. “But as we move further into the
21st century, there are going to be many
more high-value-added coal raw materials
that will become available. These will make
a host of products from carbon foams and
graphites to graphene and carbon fiber and
a wide range of other products.”
A Major Innovation
Touchstone Research Laboratories
is already well on its way to producing
many of these new materials.
“Burning coal or consuming coal to
make steel are very low-value-added processes,”
says Joseph. “But when you use
the coal to make aerospace materials,
automotive materials or even construction
materials, the value of the coal goes up, and
there is a big opportunity to differentiate
the coal from one source to another.”
Touchstone Research Laboratories’ first
major innovation was CFOAM, a strong,
fireproof carbon foam made from coal.
CFOAM has a variety of applications and
is often used in the aerospace industry to
produce molds for manufacturing carbon
fiber parts like rocket nozzles. Touchstone
built some of the molds for the James Webb
Space Telescope, which will be the most
powerful telescope in history when it is
launched in 2021. NASA recently provided
Touchstone Research Laboratories with
$124,000 to help develop additional
next-generation tools made from CFOAM.
CFOAM was approached during the
war in Iraq to help detect improvised explosive
devices and is also used in Touchstone’s
silicon carbide foam, an extremely
high-temperature material nearly as hard
as diamonds. The company has a $1.7
million contract with the U.S. Department
of Energy to produce it.
“You can do all kinds of things to it
to test its durability like hold welding
torches against it and it will never get
overheated,” says Joseph. “We mix coal
with other things that are proprietary
and cook at a high temperature to form
the silicon carbide. It has many applications
as a high-temperature material,
ranging from concentrated solar power to
space and hypersonic vehicles. CFOAM
is finding real traction in the aerospace
industry to make next-generation aircraft
rockets and satellites, but these applications
alone do not move the needle for use
of coal. We are developing applications
that could use hundreds of millions of
tons of coal per year. For example, there
are low-cost versions of CFOAM being
developed for the construction industry.
If they were used to build houses, it has
been estimated that it would take 85 tons
of coal per house, and the house would
be mostly fireproof.”
A Growing Market
CONSOL Energy Inc. announced an
investment in CFOAM in January 2020
to support the coal-to-products revolution
and acquired 25 percent equity interest
in CFOAM Corp., the holding company
for CFOAM, Ltd. and CFOAM LLC.
CFOAM, Ltd., one of Touchstone’s spinoff
companies, trades on the Australian
Stock Exchange and is part of 27 patents.
Through the partnership, CONSOL Energy
plans to pursue the creation of high-performance
engineering materials, and the
company predicts materials to have a more
than $15 billion total addressable market.
CONSOL is also part of a U.S. Department
of Energy-funded project with Ohio
University and other industry partners to
develop coal plastic composites for engineered
composite decking and other
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