When in 1939 war did break out between Germany on the one hand, and Britain and France on the other, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dutifully invoked the Neutrality Acts. However, he believed that this was a fundamentally different war from World War I.
Another advanced coal technology is coal gasification, a process in which coal is converted to a gas (called syngas) before it is burned, making it easier to separate CO2 as a relatively pure gas before power is generated.
Electricity production is the primary use of coal in the United States. Most of the coal mined in the United States is transported to a power plant, crushed to a very small particle size, and burned. Heat from the burning coal is used to produce steam, which turns a generator to produce electricity. Most of the electricity consumed in the United States is made by burning coal.