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>>How many leaves fall each year. How many in 100 years? How many in a million? or 40 million?

as an agriculturalist operating a tropical fruit tree plantation...I think I can tell you what happens to all the fallen leaves. They fall, they rot and turn into fertilizer!

What fascinates me now is the inclusion of sulphur in oil shale...and coal. Where did the sulphur originate? Isn’t the most expensive part of refining crude due to the removal of sulphur, and isn’t sulphur a contributing danger in coal mining?

What might be the connection? (You tell me that and I’ll stick to growing papayas and mangoes, LOL!)<<

You are right about the leaves - they don’t usually get buried deep enough or fast enough to decay without oxygen and turn into black carbon. In my defense, I’ve been up for three hours and my beloved wife has not yet brought me coffee.

But... black shale is usually found in Paleozoic or Mesozoic strata i.e. from 540 million years ago (mya) to 65 million years ago. So with almost half a billion years to work with its not hard to see how quite a bit of plant matter could have accumulated and sometimes been buried to fast to decay normally.

Sulfur. Except for the part where sulfur compounds tend to stink and make acid rain ,sulfur is actually kind of cool. Its in the same column of the periodic table as oxygen and there is a sulfur cycle like there is an oxygen cycle.

I don’t know much about biology but I’ve read sulfur is important in proteins and vitamins. Bacteria collect the sulfur and plants and animals absorb it. when its burned it goes up as sulfur dioxide and then back down as acid rain and it starts all over. Maybe somebody will wander into the thread who can tell us more.

In my defense, I’ve been up for three hours and my beloved wife has not yet brought me coffee.

no need to apologize, I enjoyed and appreciated your response. It's almost midnight here, enjoy your coffee, I'm heading off for some shut-eye.

I believe there are two kinds of sulfur in coal; inherent and pyritic. We were able to remove the pyrites by first crushing and then water media separation in cyclones. The inherent sulfur couldn't be removed.
From firsthand observation of coal in bank, the pyritic sulfur looks as if it perked down to the coal bed from the shale and clays. I read somewhere that inherent sulfur was related to the brackishness of the swamp/peat bog that became the coal seam.