PROSES UPGRADING BATUBARA KUALITAS RENDAH ASAL SULAWESI SELATAN MENGGUNAKAN LARUTAN KIMIA DAN PROSES PEMANASAN

Abstract

The eastern Indonesian province has coal reserves of 368.49 million tons spread in the provinces of SouthSulawesi, Central Sulawesi, North Maluku and Papua. Whereas South Sulawesi has coal reserves of around 231.12million tons spread in 9 districts. The largest coal reserves in the districts of Maros, Barru, Bone and Sidrap Sidrap haveexplored around 20.06% of the total reserves. The remaining 79.94% is of low quality coal, making it less profitable forinvestors. While the need for coal energy sources for transportation and industry is experiencing a very rapiddevelopment, and only relies on high quality coal. The Low rank coal has a high water content, ash content, flyingsubstance content and sulfur content, which will cause the coal's calorific value to be low so that the cost of burning coalper unit of calories becomes higher, and the impact of environmental pollution is also not good. To overcome this,research is carried out to improve the quality of coal or upgrading coal using chemical solutions and coal heating attemperature of 200oC. The Proximate analysis results obtained by the coal from the upgrading process using 20% ofHydrochloric acid and 20% of Sodium Hydroxide solution as well as the drying process at 200 oC can reduce watercontent up to 39.47 - 51.89%, ash content 48.15 - 57.93%, sulfur content 66.96 - 85.52%, flying substances 33.97 -50.13%, and increasing carbon content up to 36.60 -60.42% and heating values up to 22.53 -34.68%.