Prof. Li Baoqing from the CAS Institute of Coal Chemistry (ICC) won the 2004 Award for Innovation in Coal Conversion at the 21st International Pittsburgh Coal Conference held from September 12 to 17 in Osaka, Japan.

    The Annual International Pittsburgh Coal Conference is a get-together for world coal experts. As part of the meeting, its awards committee will announce the winner of the prestigious Pitt Award, which is to honor an individual, who has made a recent and significant contribution to the new technologies, new procedures or new policies toward coal utilization.

    Prof. Li is the first Chinese who has won such an honor. He entered ICC as early as in 1964 and rejoined the institute in 1991 after receiving his doctoral degree from the Free Universiteit Brussel in 1990. He served as Chairman of the 10th International Conference on Coal Science in 1999. Over the past four decades, Prof. Li has made important contributions to coal conversion technologies. He and his co-workers proposed and developed several new concepts in coal pyrolysis and carbonization, such as staged coal pyrolysis under hydrogen-rich gas and pyrolysis under trace oxygen, which can be used as a new route for the clean and effective conversion and utilization of high sulfur coals. They identified a new hydrogen bond in coal and its transformation and conversion during pyrolysis. They also identified the effects of minerals and additives on the removal of sulfur and nitrogen during pyrolysis, gasification and combustion. They have developed a new procedure for producing soluble humic acid from coal, and proposed a new method for coal water slurry stability by ultrasonic irradiation and a new process for co-carbonization of coal and waste plastics.