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.
Sasol successfully used the longwall mining method from 1967 to 1987. Today Sasol is one of the leaders in coal mining technology and was the first to develop in-seam drilling from surface using a directional drilling methodology. This has been developed into an effective exploration tool.