Photo by Joselyn King Brian Joseph, center, president and CEO of Touchstone Research Laboratories, speaks with daughter Tesla Joseph and Jennifer Rohrig, manager of business retention and expansion at the West Virginia Division of Economic Development, during the ribbon cutting for a new building for Touchstone Advanced Components on the Touchstone campus in Triadelphia.

TRIADELPHIA – If the future of Touchstone Advanced Components is about to lift off, its rise will be powered by the parts and technology it makes from local coal for the aerospace industry.

Touchstone Advanced Components – producers of the C-Foam product made from coal byproduct – unveiled a new 12,500-foot manufacturing facility Friday on the Touchstone campus in Triadelphia.

In the building they expect to increase the production of aerospace parts, and perhaps double their number of employees from 50 to about 100.

The additional space will enable the company to further expand its operations in using C-Foam to create tools, molds and parts needed by the aerospace industry to grow technology.

Daniel Connell, president with Touchstone Advanced Composites, explained the company sells its tools and parts to the biggest name aerospace interests in America. The products are mostly created with carbon fiber composite parts. These are light-weight, high-strength and high-performance items used in creating next generation aircraft, he explained.

“Our industrial heritage is paving an innovative future, and we can be leaders not just in energy,” Connell said. “What the expansion does for us is allow us to grow into more than just making C-Foam and Aerospace tools. We can also the C-Foam and tools to make aerospace parts. That also opens up a tremendous growth opportunity for the company and for the region. That is where the big market growth is.

“The C-Foam and our tooling are kind of our secret sauce. The parts provide a really good growth opportunity on top of that.”

The move “is not just about space,” but “about people,” he continued.

“We have 50 employees working in this building, and we expect it to double over time to more than 100. That is really exciting,” Connell said.

A “clean room” off from the main area of the new building provides an extra 7,000 square feet of space “just to make airplane parts,” explained Brian Joseph, president and CEO of Touchstone Research Laboratories.

Joseph led the team that created C-Foam around 2005. In 2013, Touchstone Research Laboratories spun off its C-Foam production component into Touchstone Advanced Components. Touchstone Advanced Components then was acquired by CONSOL Energy in 2023, and Consol Energy became what is now part of Core Natural Resources.

On Friday, Joseph celebrated just how far Touchstone has come since he started the business nearly 30 years ago. At that time, he utilized a small pizza oven to make Touchstone’s first composite parts.

“In this building, we take coal that’s been pulled out of the ground and end up building aerospace products – things that go to space. It’s just amazing. It’s amazing the scale that we do here,” he said.

“From a small pizza oven, we’ve grown to large autoclaves to large scale production. It’s amazing… This is what I thought would happen, and I hope it happens much bigger than this. That’s the dream.”