“It is in fact, rather wasteful to simply burn coal as it comes from the mine...”
So, you are saying I should close off the coal chute into my basement and convert the associated bin into a workroom?. No need to think about replacing the natural gas furnace and going back to the old ways?
The burning of coal in home furnaces was actually a step UP from the burning of seasoned wood for that purpose, as there was WAY more heat energy in a ton of coal than there was in an equal weight of dried and seasoned hardwood.
The harvest of stove wood from the wood lot was a home-grown energy supply, and it generated heat twice - once when working up the felled trees into stove fuel, and again when the wood was actually burned.
Still, the burning of coal for residential heat is not a particularly efficient use of that resource, because of the various undesirable by-products of somewhat incomplete combustion.