Decreasing methane emissions from China’s coal mining with rebounded coal production

Abstract

China is the world’s largest anthropogenic methane (CH4) emitter, with coal mine methane (CMM) as one of the main contributors. However, previous studies have not reach consensus on the magnitude and trend of China’s CMM emissions since 2010. Through distribution fitting and Monte Carlo methods, dynamic emission factors (EFs) of CMM at the province-level were derived with high confidence; along with the updated data on surface mining, abandoned coal mines, and methane utilization, we revealed that China’s annual CMM emissions were estimated at 20.11 Tg between 2010 and 2019 with a decline of 0.93 Tg yr−1. Although coal production was revived in 2017, we found that the growing trend of China’s CMM emissions since 2012 were curbed by the previously-overlooked factors including the growth of CMM utilization and coal production from surface mining, and decrease of EFs driven by the closure of high CH4-content coal mines and a regional production shift to lower-emission areas.