ABSTRACT
The first evidence of the degradation of coals by fungi was given by Cohen and Gabriele, who reported that the basidiomycetes Polyporus versicolor and Poria monticola were capable of growing on and solubilizing lignite. Much of the earlier work on coal degradation by fungal species was conducted using surface cultures grown over an agar layer. This chapter reports a preliminary study of the biodegradation of coal using a chemostat-type bioreactor operated in the batch mode. It describes a method to analyze degradation subsequent to microbial-coal contact in the chemostat bioreactor. To determine whether the decrease in transmittance of the fluid phase is due to microbial degradation of leonardite, a control experiment was conducted in the absence of fungal species. If there is to be significant biodegradation, the experimental observation that there are at most 570 mg of solubilized material for each 5 g of leonardite then implies that most of the degraded material must be insoluble at 4.2 pH.
