It seemed I used the right ingredients to input and it still would not produce coal. When I checked, it is missing steam which I have connected.

I was a goofball with my mistake. I found out that you can have boilers set to a specific temperature and that way you can get the steam you need for the chemical plants to work.

Great, it resolved itself ... [problems that do that, have a tendency to also reemerge by themselves] a few notes:

What you describe is not vanilla behaviour:
- there only exist 165° (burner boilers) and 500° (heat exchangers) steam
- if you mix them, you can achive any temperature between that
- unlike with coal liquefaction only 165° boiler steam should work for this mods recipe

I guess you have another mod installed that allows heating of water like pre v15.10
That water would only counts as steam over a given threshold temperature.