After close consultation with our partners, meeting planners, Kentucky officials, as well as a lot of you, the American Coal Ash Association and the University of Kentucky Center for Applied Energy Research has made the difficult decision to postpone the World of Coal Ash (WOCA) from 2021 to 2022.
We will still be hosting WOCA in northern Kentucky, utilizing the same facilities. We also intend to host this during the same time period – May of 2022. We are working with our partners in northern Kentucky to confirm the new dates. Once we have those new dates, we will share them with you.
Having spent the past 18 months working with WOCA exhibitors, sponsors, speakers, and event partners, we were hoping to be able to host this meeting in a safe and effective way in 2021. However, it has become abundantly clear that providing our true WOCA experience was not going to be possible in just a few short months.
As anyone who has attended a past WOCA knows, the engaging, lively, and social aspects of the meeting are what separates WOCA from other conferences. Those aspects of the meeting would be greatly diminished as organizations are still facing travel bans and state and international lockdowns continue in many parts of the country and the world.
If you are an exhibitor or sponsor, you will be hearing directly from the American Coal Ash Association. If you have registered to attend WOCA, you will be hearing from the UK Center for Applied Energy Research. All existing hotel reservations at the Marriott Rivercenter and Embassy Suites Rivercenter have been cancelled for you. If you made reservations at another hotel, AirBnB, or outside the block you will need to cancel those arrangements according to your agreement.
For those of you that have submitted your abstracts for WOCA 2021, you have several choices: you will have access to your abstracts, so you can update the current abstracts (timeline for new abstract submission to be determined) or delete the current abstracts and upload new abstracts when the new submission window for WOCA 2022 is open (to be determined). Additionally, for those of you interested in writing a ‘proceedings paper’ for your current abstract, as you want to get your current research/work out into the stratosphere, but want to present new data in 2022, we will be publishing a non-peer reviewed Spring 2021 issue of the CCGP journal online for that purpose. For questions about abstracts, please contact anne.oberlink@uky.edu.
We are excited to make WOCA 2022 the best and most memorable conference yet. Being able to gather the world’s leading coal ash products experts under one roof is the highlight of our year, and we can’t wait to see you in northern Kentucky next year.
If you have any questions, please contact Alyssa Barto at alyssa.barto@acaa-usa.org or Dave Melanson at david.melanson@uky.edu.
