162 GEHRS 



were from small facilities that might not be indicative of commercial 

 operations. Nevertheless, sufficient data exist to cause concern. 



Unfortunately, ecological data are lacking with respect to either 

 the products or the effluents from the Carbide facility or from the 

 surrounding environment. 



The United States, through the Department of Energy, is actively 

 supporting the development of more than 20 processes for 

 converting coal to liquid, gaseous, or solid fuels. Sufficient data exist 

 to necessitate research concerning the possible health and 

 environmental consequences of these technologies. Several unique 

 characteristics of the level of development of the processes limit the 

 types of research that can be conducted (Gehrs and Wells, 1977). 

 The small size of the existing facilities, coupled with changes in mode 

 of operating, makes conducting field studies around such units 

 relatively useless. Furthermore, evaluation of effluents from a 

 specific plant is tenuous because of lack of effluent treatment, little 

 steady-state operation, and basic questions concerning similarity of 

 effluent composition after process scale up. Engineers are unsure that 

 a 20,000-ton/day facility will produce the same effluents as a 

 scaled-down replica using only 50 tons/day of coal. Finally, the 

 chemical composition of effluent streams is extremely complex, with 

 hundreds, perhaps thousands, of compounds in each effluent (Shults, 

 1976). Developing meaningful data on the ecological hazards of these 

 effluents is further complicated by the myriad of potential 

 interactions that may occur between the various chemical com- 

 pounds (i.e., synergism, antagonism, etc.). These unique attributes of 

 currently . existing coal-conversion facilities are not listed here to 

 suggest that environmental research is futile; they are presented 

 rather to emphasize that developing a meaningful environmental 

 research program requires awareness and understanding of these 

 limitations and a delineation of the purpose or goals of the research. 

 Ecological research related to coal conversion has three major goals: 



1. To aid the development of amenable coal-conversion 

 technologies 



2. To develop a data base for assessing the effects of 

 coal-conversion technologies on biological communities 



3. To determine the form, source, and potential concentrations 

 of trace contaminants that may reach man and other biota from 

 environmental releases of coal-conversion effluents 



The approach chosen is determined by the specific goal of the 

 research activity. 



The remainder of this paper addresses the scientific approaches 

 which have been used to assess the hazards of a particular technology 



