by Kevin Collins, President and CEO

Sunday’s (August 26) New York Times page one story “As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes” offered a dramatic look at the country’s air pollution problems as it grapples with rapid economic growth. As the story reported, only 1 percent of China’s city dwellers breathe air the European Union considers safe.

China gets two thirds of its energy from coal and the story reported that in 2005 China added as much power to its grid as Britain generates in a year.  Most of that power comes from small and medium power plants lacking modern emissions control technologies.

Combine the growth and environmental issues with China’s transition from a net coal exporter to a coal importer and you can understand why they are looking for ways to make cleaner use of their estimated 52 billion tons of lower rank lignite coals.

That scenario is ready made for Evergreen, and as I have mentioned before we recently sent a delegation to China at the request of the Department of Energy to explain our technology. The talks were positive and are continuing.  It would be fair to say that we see the Chinese market as a ready made opportunity for us and we are aggressively pursuing it.

Our China efforts are not coming at the expense of our drive to build a domestic business. Rather, we have a separate and deeply experienced team working on the Asian initiative, and I look forward to updating you as we pass certain milestones in the International market.

CONGRATULATIONS TO BUCKEYE FOR SAFETY AWARD

On a separate note, congratulations are in order to our Buckeye Industrial Mining subsidiary and their Columbiana Pits for the "Sentinals of Safety Award" from the National Mining Association.

As I told Buckeye President John Grisham, mining by its very nature is hard and sometimes repetitive. It is important work--and it must go on in order to keep our country moving and growing. This makes their safety achievement even more remarkable, because they have reached a consistent level of safety success under difficult conditions throughout ongoing daily operations.

We tip our hardhats to John and the crew at Buckeye and the Columbiana pits.