By Greg Jordan, Bluefield Daily Telegraph
PRINCETON, W.Va. – A coal symposium focusing on the industry’s local, national and international future opened its doors Monday to the people wanting to learn more about the technology and trends making up that future.
The Bluefield Coal Symposium, featuring the theme Using U.S. Coal for a Better America, opened Monday and continues until Wednesday at the Chuck Mathena Center in Princeton. Presented by the Chamber of Commerce of the Two Virginias and CoalZoom.com, it is a national coal industry event with industry speakers to discuss achieving greater safety and productivity for both underground and surface mining.
Today’s keynote speaker, Michelle Manook, chief executive of FutureCoal and formerly with the World Coal Association, spoke Monday about how the coal industry is evolving on the international as well as the national level.
Manook said she came to support the coal industry at the local level.
“I travel around the world to all coal consuming and producing nations and really just in support of what’s going on across the coal value chain and looking forward to be being part of the conference and hearing what’s happening here, but also to bring some of what’s happening internationally and connecting all of the dots for this incredible resource, what I call a critical resource, which is coal,” Manook said.
“I really want to talk about what I call sustainable coal stewardship,” she said about today’s address to the attendees. “What that’s about is really the opportunities for coal across the value chain in the pre-combustion, combustion and beyond combustion. It’s a real technology story and it’s really highlighting probably what are the two largest coal-based economies in China and India are actually doing. They see coal as an ecosystem.”
