Thirteen confirmed fatalities following explosion at coal mine in Henan Province, China.

Thirteen people have now been confirmed dead, and another three are still missing following an explosion at a coal mine in Henan Province, China, on Saturday 13 January 2023. The incident happened at 2.55 pm local time, when 425 people were below ground at the Pingdingshan Tian'an Coal Mining Co's No 12 Mine in the city of Pingdingshan, and is reported to have been caused by a gas outburst. A group of miners rescued from a refuge close to the site of the explosion some hours after the explosion were treated for mild oxygen starvation, but all are expected to make a full recovery.

A group of rescue workers entering the Pingdingshan No 12 Mine on Saturday 13 January 2024. Hao Yuan/Xinhua.

Coal is formed when buried organic material, principally wood, in heated and pressurised, forcing off hydrogen and oxygen (i.e. water) and leaving more-or-less pure carbon. Methane is formed by the decay of organic material within the coal. There is typically little pore-space within coal, but the methane can be trapped in a liquid form under pressure. Some countries have started to extract this gas as a fuel in its own right. When this pressure is released suddenly, as by mining activity, then the methane turns back to a gas, expanding rapidly causing, an explosion. This is a bit like the pressure being released on a carbonated drink; the term 'explosion' does not necessarily imply fire in this context, although as methane is flammable this is quite likely.

Fire is much feared in coal mines due to this combination of flammable gas and solids, with methane and coal dust both potentially explosive when they come into contact with naked flames. To make matters worse, the limited oxygen supply in mines often means that such fires will involve incomplete combustion, in which all the oxygen is used up, but instead of forming carbon dioxide forms the much more deadly carbon dioxide, with potentially lethal consequences for anyone in the mine.

As coal is comprised more-or-less of pure carbon, and therefore reacts freely with oxygen (particularly when in dust form), to create carbon dioxide and (more-deadly) carbon monoxide, while at the same time depleting the supply of oxygen. This means that subterranean coal mines need good ventilation systems, and that fatalities can occur if these break down. 

Despite attempts to modernise its energy network, China is still reliant on coal for much of its energy, with 400 000 tonnes of coal mined in China in July 2023, and over 200 million tonnes of coal imported each year, most of it from Indonesia, Australia, South Africa, the United States, and Russia. China has been trying to reduce its dependence on foreign coal by expanding its own coal industry with new mines, but this has come at the cost of more accidents within the industry. 

China gains 70% of its energy from coal-burning power stations, which places the country under great pressure to maintain coal supplies. This has led to a poor safety record within the mining sector, particularly in the private sector, where there is a culture of seeking quick profits in poorly regulated (and sometimes officially non-existent) mines.  However, the Chinese authorities have been making efforts to remedy this situation, introducing safety regulations and closing (or at least attempting to close) mines that fail to comply. Annual deaths in Chinese mines have steadily fallen from 6995 in 2002 to 245 in 2022 (the latest year for which statistics are available).

Rescue attempts at the Pingdingshan No 12 mine are being co-ordinated by local authorities, with operations at all Pingdingshan Tian'an Coal mines having been suspended due to the high number of accidents which have happened at mines run by the company recently.

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Eleven killed by explosion at coal mine in Shaanxi Province, China.

Eleven people have died following an explosion at a coal mine in Shaanxi Province, China, on Monday 21 August 2023. The incident took place at the Xintai Coal Mine close to the city of Yan'An, about 900 km to the southeast of Beijing, at 8.26 pm local time. Ninety people are reported to have been below ground at the time of the evacuation, most of whom were evacuated safely, although two later died of injuries sustained in the explosion, and nine miners who failed to escape from the mine were later found dead by rescue teams. Another eleven people are still being treated in hospital for injuries sustained in the explosion; all are reported to be in a stable condition.

An aerial photograph of the Xintai Coal Mine in Yan'An, Shaanxi, taken on 22 August 2023. Xinhau.

Coal is formed when buried organic material, principally wood, in heated and pressurised, forcing off hydrogen and oxygen (i.e. water) and leaving more-or-less pure carbon. Methane is formed by the decay of organic material within the coal. There is typically little pore-space within coal, but the methane can be trapped in a liquid form under pressure. Some countries have started to extract this gas as a fuel in its own right. When this pressure is released suddenly, as by mining activity, then the methane turns back to a gas, expanding rapidly causing, an explosion. This is a bit like the pressure being released on a carbonated drink; the term 'explosion' does not necessarily imply fire in this context, although as methane is flammable this is quite likely.

Fire is much feared in coal mines due to this combination of flammable gas and solids, with methane and coal dust both potentially explosive when they come into contact with naked flames. To make matters worse, the limited oxygen supply in mines often means that such fires will involve incomplete combustion, in which all the oxygen is used up, but instead of forming carbon dioxide forms the much more deadly carbon dioxide, with potentially lethal consequences for anyone in the mine.

As coal is comprised more-or-less of pure carbon, and therefore reacts freely with oxygen (particularly when in dust form), to create carbon dioxide and (more-deadly) carbon monoxide, while at the same time depleting the supply of oxygen. This means that subterranean coal mines need good ventilation systems, and that fatalities can occur if these break down. 

Despite attempts to modernise its energy network, China is still reliant on coal for much of its energy, with 400 000 tonnes of coal mined in China in July 2023, and over 200 million tonnes of coal imported each year, most of it from Indonesia, Australia, South Africa, the United States, and Russia. China has been trying to reduce its dependence on foreign coal by expanding its own coal industry with new mines such as Xintai, but this has come at the cost of more accidents within the industry. 

An investigation into the cause of the explosion has now begun, with seven people reported to have been arrested, including the mine's owner and a major shareholder.

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Twenty one confirmed fatalities following explosion at Colombian coal mine.

Twenty one miners have now been confirmed following an explosion at a coal mine in Cundinamarca Department, Colombia, on Tuesday 14 March 2023. The explosion reportedly caused several of the mine's entrances to collapse, trapping 30 workers below ground. After 30 hours digging through the debris, rescue workers were able to recover nine miners alive. The Colombian mining industry is notoriously dangerous, with 146 miners having died in 117 incidents in the year 2022.

Rescue workers at a coal mine in Colombia, following an underground explosion which killed 21 people on Tuesday 14 March 2023. Luisa Gonzalez/Reuters.

Coal is formed when buried organic material, principally wood, in heated and pressurised, forcing off hydrogen and oxygen (i.e. water) and leaving more-or-less pure carbon. Methane is formed by the decay of organic material within the coal. There is typically little pore-space within coal, but the methane can be trapped in a liquid form under pressure. Some countries have started to extract this gas as a fuel in its own right. When this pressure is released suddenly, as by mining activity, then the methane turns back to a gas, expanding rapidly causing, an explosion. This is a bit like the pressure being released on a carbonated drink; the term 'explosion' does not necessarily imply fire in this context, although as methane is flammable this is quite likely.

Fire is much feared in coal mines due to this combination of flammable gas and solids, with methane and coal dust both potentially explosive when they come into contact with naked flames. To make matters worse, the limited oxygen supply in mines often means that such fires will involve incomplete combustion, in which all the oxygen is used up, but instead of forming carbon dioxide forms the much more deadly carbon dioxide, with potentially lethal consequences for anyone in the mine.

As coal is comprised more-or-less of pure carbon, and therefore reacts freely with oxygen (particularly when in dust form), to create carbon dioxide and (more-deadly) carbon monoxide, while at the same time depleting the supply of oxygen. This means that subterranean coal mines need good ventilation systems, and that fatalities can occur if these break down. 

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Police begin to remove protesters from German village scheduled to be destroyed for coal mine expansion.

Police in North Rhine-Westphalia have begun to remove protesters from the village of Lützerath, which is scheduled to be destroyed by an expansion of the Garzweiler Coal Mine. The twelfth century village was abandoned by its original occupants two years ago, following an unsuccessful legal battle against the mine's expansion, but the village was subsequently occupied by activists concerned about the levels of atmospheric pollution likely to be caused by extracting and burning the coal.

Police officers surrounding climate protesters in the village of Lützerath in North Rhine-Westphalia this week. Thilo Schmuelgen/Reuters.

Coal, like other fossil fuels (hydrocarbons), can be burned to produce energy, producing carbon dioxide as a product. Atmospheric carbon dioxide absorbs energy from sunlight and releases it as light in the infrared part of the spectrum, which we encounter as heat (all gas molecules will tend to absorb energy then release it as light at a specific wavelength, the blue colour of the sky reflects the wavelength at which nitrogen, the majority component of the Earth's atmosphere, releases energy, while the red colour of sunsets and sunrises is caused by oxygen). This has become problematic as the huge amounts of fossil fuels burned by Human industry in the past two centuries have led to an increase in the proportion of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, leading to global changes in climate. 

Coal is a particularly troublesome fuel as the extraction process often involves clearing huge areas of ground surface, which are then unusable without significant remediation work, and releases large amounts of particulate matter, itself a pollutant which can cause lung disease, into the local atmosphere, as well as large quantities of methane, another greenhouse gas and the cause of many explosions and poison gas incidents in deep pit coal mines.

The Garzweiler Mine, like most coal mines in Germany produces brown lignite coal, which is a 'low maturity' coal, which has not been buried as deeply or for as long as other coals, and therefore is less pure than high maturity coals, which have had most of the non-carbon material squeezed out of them. In practice, this means that low maturity coals have a higher sulphur content than high maturity coals, which when the coal is burned forms sulphur dioxide gas, which can dissolve in water droplets suspended in clouds to form a dilute sulphuric acid, which falls as acid rain, adding to the negative environmental impact of using this coal as a fuel.

Due to this higher environmental impact, authorities in Germany had been looking to reduce the amount of coal mined and burned within the country, by switching to power generation methods with a lower environmental impact. Some of this alternative provision came in the form of renewable energy sources such as solar or wind power, but a lot of production was simply switched from coal to cheap natural gas (methane) imported with Russia. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the strong support that Germany offered to Ukraine during this crisis, supplies of gas reaching Germany were first reduced and then completely cut off, causing the German Government to return to coal use as a way of maintaining electricity generation.

RWE, the company which operates the mine, had been planning to remove Lützerath, and several other villages in the area, from the map for some years, although this plan was hampered by the country's political ambition to reduce greenhouse emissions and switch to cleaned energy. However, following the development of the Russian crisis, coal has come after consideration again, and following talks with RWE in October, the Robert Habek, the German minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, took the decision to allow RWE to excavate at Lützerath, although this was accompanied by a pledge to prevent the demolition of five other villages in the area, which RWE had hoped to remove, and the bringing forward of a goal to end all coal production in North Rhine-Westphalia from 2038 to 2030.

This news was met with great dismay by environmentalists in Germany and across Europe, who had hoped that Habek, a member of the Green Party serving in Olaf Scholz's coalition government, would resist calls to return to coal production as a way of meeting the country's energy needs.

Shortly after this, many additional protesters began to arrive at the site, joining the protesters already camped there, and improving on and extending the network of defences there. This was followed by a war of words between RWE, the German Federal Police, and the climate protesters, with the coal mining company claiming that the protesters are illegal squatters, while the protesters claim that the unfolding climate crisis justifies their actions.

Protesters building barricades around the village of Lützerath. Fabian Ritter/DOCKS Collective/Washington Post.

On Monday 9 January 2023 a court gave the police permission to clear the site, and following a series of orders for the protesters to leave, they entered the village on Wednesday 11 January. The majority of the protesters agreed to leave peacefully once police entered the site, but some were less co-operative, barricading themselves inside buildings, or climbing trees and improvised structures to make themselves harder to remove. Witnesses have reported some protesters throwing rocks and bottles at the police, while the police claim to have also been attacked with petrol bombs.

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Explosion at Turkish coal mine kills 41.

Forty one miners have now been confirmed dead following an explosion at the Amasra Muessese Mudurlugu Coal Mine in Bartin Province, on the north coast of Anatolian Turkey, on Friday 14 October 2022. All of the 110 workers who were below ground at the mine have now been accounted for, with 28 suffering injuries, 11 of whom required hospital treatment, one having subsequently been discharged. The explosion is reported to have occurred at a depth of about 300 m, 49 of them working in what is considered to be the mines 'danger zone' between 300 and 350 m below the surface, where the coal is particularly rich in methane gas.

Smoke billowing from the Amasra Muessese Mudurlugu Coal Mine in Bartin Province, Turkey, on Friday 14 October 2022. BBC.

Coal is formed when buried organic material, principally wood, in heated and pressurised, forcing off hydrogen and oxygen (i.e. water) and leaving more-or-less pure carbon. Methane is formed by the decay of organic material within the coal. There is typically little pore-space within coal, but the methane can be trapped in a liquid form under pressure. Some countries have started to extract this gas as a fuel in its own right. When this pressure is released suddenly, as by mining activity, then the methane turns back to a gas, expanding rapidly causing, an explosion. This is a bit like the pressure being released on a carbonated drink; the term 'explosion' does not necessarily imply fire in this context, although as methane is flammable this is quite likely.

Fire is much feared in coal mines due to this combination of flammable gas and solids, with methane and coal dust both potentially explosive when they come into contact with naked flames. To make matters worse, the limited oxygen supply in mines often means that such fires will involve incomplete combustion, in which all the oxygen is used up, but instead of forming carbon dioxide forms the much more deadly carbon dioxide, with potentially lethal consequences for anyone in the mine.

As coal is comprised more-or-less of pure carbon, and therefore reacts freely with oxygen (particularly when in dust form), to create carbon dioxide and (more-deadly) carbon monoxide, while at the same time depleting the supply of oxygen. This means that subterranean coal mines need good ventilation systems, and that fatalities can occur if these break down. 

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Explosions at Polish coal mines kill at least six.

Six miners and mine rescue workers have been declared dead and several more are missing following a series of methane explosions at two coal mines in southern Poland this week. The first explosion occurred at the Pniowek Mine in Upper Silesia Province early on the morning of Wednesday 20 April 2022, trapping a number of miners over 1000 m below the surface. Rescue workers who entered the mine to try to reach the trapped workers were caught by a series of further explosions, which killed at least one rescue worker and three miners, with another six miners seriously injured and seven more still trapped within the mine. The following day another rescue team was hit by two further explosions, injuring ten, some of them seriously. Rescue attempts were suspended on Friday 22 April due to the danger of further explosions, despite miners still being trapped within the mine. 

 

The Pniówek coal mine, in Poland's Upper Silesia Province, is part of the state-run Jastrzebska Spolka Weglowa group, the country’s biggest coal producer. Zbigniew Meissner/Polska Agencja Prasowa.

On Saturday 23 April an Earthquake triggered a release of methane at the Borynia-Zofiowka Mine, also in Upper Silesia, triggering a series of explosions and trapping ten miners below ground. Four of these miners have now been located by rescue workers, one of whom has been declared dead. No statement has been made about the health of the other three rescued miners, and another six are still missing.

Coal is formed when buried organic material, principally wood, in heated and pressurised, forcing off hydrogen and oxygen (i.e. water) and leaving more-or-less pure carbon. Methane is formed by the decay of organic material within the coal. There is typically little pore-space within coal, but the methane can be trapped in a liquid form under pressure. Some countries have started to extract this gas as a fuel in its own right. When this pressure is released suddenly, as by mining activity, then the methane turns back to a gas, expanding rapidly causing, an explosion. This is a bit like the pressure being released on a carbonated drink; the term 'explosion' does not necessarily imply fire in this context, although as methane is flammable this is quite likely.

Fire is much feared in coal mines due to this combination of flammable gas and solids, with methane and coal dust both potentially explosive when they come into contact with naked flames. To make matters worse, the limited oxygen supply in mines often means that such fires will involve incomplete combustion, in which all the oxygen is used up, but instead of forming carbon dioxide forms the much more deadly carbon dioxide, with potentially lethal consequences for anyone in the mine.

Coal is also comprised more or less of pure carbon, and therefore reacts freely with oxygen (particularly when in dust form), to create carbon dioxide and (more-deadly) carbon monoxide, while at the same time depleting the supply of oxygen. This means that subterranean coal mines need good ventilation systems, and that fatalities can occur if these break down. 

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Russian mine safely evacuates 128 employees after a rise in carbon monoxide is detected.

A mine in Kemerovo Oblast in southwest Siberia has safely evacuated 128 miners who were working below ground when a rise in carbon monoxide was detected on Sunday 19 December 2021. The sudden increase triggered concerns that a fire might be burning within the mine (coal, which is essentially pure carbon, usually burns to produce carbon dioxide, but when the oxygen supply is limited, as in an underground mine, incomplete combustion can result in the production of the more deadly carbon monoxide). However, the owners of the Ruban Mine have found no evidence of a fire, and now believe the gas was emitted directly from the coal following a rise in temperature within the mine.

 

Russian emergency workers attending a mine in Kemerovo Oblast following the detection of a rise in carbon monoxide levels, which provoked concerns about the risks of an underground fire. Generico.

Coal is formed when buried organic material, principally wood, in heated and pressurized, forcing off hydrogen and oxygen (i.e. water) and leaving more-or-less pure carbon. Methane is formed by the decay of organic material within the coal. There is typically little pore-space within coal, but the methane can be trapped in a liquid form under pressure. Some countries have started to extract this gas as a fuel in its own right. When this pressure is released suddenly, as by mining activity, then the methane turns back to a gas, expanding rapidly causing, an explosion. This is a bit like the pressure being released on a carbonated drink; the term 'explosion' does not necessarily imply fire in this context, although as methane is flammable this is quite likely.

Coal is also comprised more or less of pure carbon, and therefore reacts freely with oxygen (particularly when in dust form), to create carbon dioxide and (more-deadly) carbon monoxide, while at the same time depleting the supply of oxygen. This means that subterranean coal mines need good ventilation systems, and that fatalities can occur if these break down.

While this incident resulted in no harm, with employees being safely evacuated from a potential threat, which is good practice in mine safety management, the Russian Emergencies Ministry has raised concerns about mine safety in Kemerovo Oblast, following an explosion at the Listvyazhnaya Mine which killed 51 people in November, with one of the mine's owners subsequently being arrested on suspicion of falsifying data on methane emissions within the mine. Kemerovo Oblast was also the location of the worst mining disaster in post-Soviet Russian history, when an explosion at the Ulyanovskaya Mine killed more than 100 people.

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