This white paper addresses how economic and environmental concerns are shifting global energy markets away from coal towards natural gas and other technologies, making preservation of the skills associated with solid fuel firing increasingly difficult for heritage operators. The Coalition for Sustainable Rail (CSR), in association with the Natural Resources Research Institute at the University of Minnesota - Duluth (NRRI), is working to stay ahead of this eventuality by developing a direct coal replacement employing sustainable biomass.
Preliminary results are detailed in the paper, outlining steps being taken by CSR to perform instrumented testing and refinement of this material to-date. The project is specifically designed to reduce risk associated with development of the fuel by first conducting tests in quarter scale locomotives and then systematically moving toward larger, and larger equipment.
UPDATE: A newer version of this paper was re-uploaded in November 2017 that includes minor corrections to the text and content.