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The increasing demand for clean energy with minimum emission of hazardous greenhouse gases towards carbon-neutral future is driving the need for clean energy generation from unconventional resources or for development of efficient usage of carbon-based energy sources of fossil fuels i.e., crude oil and coal. Conversion of old plant and biomass through natural cooking processes within mother earth provide us fossil fuels, while contemporary biomass is used for hydrocarbon products like bio-chemicals and bio-fuels. Crude oil is a liquid by-product while coal is the residual solids of natural cracking process of bio-mass having complex mixture consisting predominantly of four main classes i.e., saturates, aromatics, resins and asphaltenes. Though, crude oil and coal is supplied the major shares of the energy demand of the civilized world, even today, the molecular architecture as well as the constituent components are not properly known in much details.
Within the value chain of crude oil business, right from producing reservoir to refinery even in the downstream activities, various challenges are faced which could be addressed through molecular level chemical and structural characterization of crude oil components. As significant amounts of crude oil remain trapped as residual oil inside the nano to micro-sized pores of the oil reservoirs, a small increment in the oil recovery efficiency would yield enormous economic benefits while enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques could provide better visualization for selection of optimized EOR methods once the molecular level interaction phenomenon among rock materials- crude oils and injection fluids is properly understood. Crude oil of different chemical composition and water intermixed in different points in the production and transportation system and caused serious flow assurance issues where molecular level characterization of crude oils is really helpful for designing proper remedial measure of all the issues related to flow assurance and demulsification. Petroleum crude contain problematic asphaltene, an organic moiety, of different nature and structural type which shows absorption in different wavelengths in the UV-visible spectrum and experimented to be a potential candidate for organic photovoltaics (OPV).
Coal, a major source of energy and cheap feedstock of carbon and carbon-based materials, could provide a feasible solution for long-term sustainable application in different spheres of human civilization. The molecular structure in coal varies interestingly during the coalification process where molecular architecture vis-à-vis rank of coal has got a tremendous significance in determining the quality and suitability for specific applications such as feedstock for chemicals and synthetic fuels. Coal has shown optimistic results as a raw material to produce carbon nanofibers (CNF), nanotubes, nano-balls, graphene oxides (GO) and a variety of carbon-based nanomaterials where proper delineation of chemical moieties with rank of coal is also very important to generate these new era biomaterials. Microstructural characterization of Indian coal of different rank clearly demonstrated their strong potential for energy storage capability in lithium-ion battery (LIB) or in sodium-ion battery (NIB) application. |