Coal is a lot more fascinating than one might think or imagine.
J.B. Haldane wrote:

"The universe is not only queerer than you imagine,
its queerer than you can imagine."

Well, this certainly applies to coal. Just about everybody knows that coal is used as a fuel for electricity generation, general heating, and making coke used in steel production. Did you know coal was a major player in the development of organic chemistry, and until after the second World War, the source of many organic
chemicals? Modern organic chemistry really began when chemists wanted to understand how dyes were formed from coal tars. In addition, because of it's ancient origins and many uses, it is of interest to many diverse areas of science.

However, scientists aren't the only people interested in coal. The world is not through with coal. There are still vast coal reserves. Sooner or later, when that great stuff, oil, is real hard to find, pump out of the ground, and refine, coal will be needed to supplement it. Just how much coal will replace oil depends on a lot of factors.
One factor is improved processes to make coal more easy to use.
In general, we will want it to look more like oil.

The types of organic and inorganic contained in coal are very complex, and can differ from millimeter to millimeter in a coal seam. This is what is both fascinating and frustrating about the field of coal research. Considering the complexity, can we ever
understand what coal is and how to utilize it more efficiently? For over a hundred years, scientists have been trying to answer these questions: How is it formed? How can we take it apart? How can we modify it? Great headway has been made in understanding coal, but there is much more to learn. Its extreme complexity easily
matches and overcomes the most sophisticated scientific instruments we use to analyze it. Coal is a great material to humble the latest and greatest scientific tools. And coal scientists, being desperate for all the information they can get, are some of the first to grab at a new scientific tool when it comes along.

Information provided by: http://chemistry.anl.gov