New Trends in Coal Conversion : Combustion, Gasification, Emissions, and Coking

Isabel Suárez-Ruiz is a Tenured Scientist at the Instituto Nacional del Carbon (INCAR-CSIC, Spain) working in the field of applied Organic Petrology on coal and coal-by products. She received her PhD in 1988 from the University of Oviedo (Spain) for her Doctoral Thesis on oil shales and source rocks. She has spent extensive periods of time carrying out research in Petrology and Organic Geochemistry in well known laboratories in France (Orléans) and the US (SIU, Carbondale, and CAER, Lexington). Dr. Suárez-Ruiz has published extensively on topics of organic petrology related to fundamental and applied aspects of this science, recently receiving the 2006 Organic Petrology Award from the International Committee for Coal and Organic Petrology (ICCP).

Fernando Rubiera is a scientific researcher at the INCAR-CSIC where he currently acts as the Director. He is also vicepresident of the Spanish Platform of CO2, where he is in charge of the groups of CO2 Capture and CO2 Utilisation. Between 1992 and 1995 he was seconded to British Coal (TSRE, Bretby) and to the University of Nottingham to conduct investigations into the optimisation of fine coal cleaning processes. He is an expert on fuel science and technology and his research lines are also directed towards the valorisation of biomass for the production of energy, including co-combustion and co-gasification with coal. Likewise, his research activities embrace the preparation, modification and textural characterisation of carbon materials with a high specificity, in terms of porous development and surface chemistry, for different applications mainly on CO2 capture from postcombustion flue gases. He has been the PI of 6 International (4 European) funded projects and several national projects, raising more than 4 M€. He is member of the Editorial Board of Biomass & Bioenergy, and the Editorial Advisory Board of Greenhouse Gases: Science and Technology

María Antonia Diez is a research scientist of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) at the National Coal Institute (INCAR) in Oviedo, Spain. She received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Chemistry from Oviedo University. She undertook postdoctoral training at the Northern Carbon Research Laboratories (NCRL) in the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (UK) and has had short-stays at the Wrocław University of Technology (Poland) and the CNRS of the Université d’Aix-Marseille III (France). Her research activity ranges from the characterization of coals for cokemaking and various aspects of the process to the structure and properties of the metallurgical coke as well as the composition and thermal behaviour of tar and pitch. Her interests expand to the environment protection mainly to the thermochemical feedstock recycling of organic wastes. This research is carried out within the framework of national and international projects and industrial contracts. She is author of over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals and chapters in books and encyclopedias. She has been Vice-director of INCAR and head of the Science and Technology of Coal and Coal Products Department. She was a member of R&D Committees on a National and European level (European Coke Committee, Chemistry and Chemical Technology of the CSIC Commission, Coal Advisory Group of the RFCS-EU).