Water Resources Utilization and Protection in the Coal Mining Area of Northern China

Shuning Dong,Shangxian Yin,Zhenxue Dai,Xiaodong Zhang,Bin Xu,Yong Han

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-38148-4

Abstract

This study investigates multiple types of water resources in the western mining area in China, their supply-demand balance by using the same dimension gray recurrence dynamic model GM (1, 1), and water content coefficients of mines to ease water supply-demand contradiction. A multi-objective programming model is proposed for optimal water resources allocation management. Optimal technical schemes for water resources allocation among different users are obtained. The optimization model improves upon the previous studies by using water demand and water supply forecast. Coordinated development for mining safety, mine water utilization, and remediation and control of water environment is achieved.

Highlights

China’s water resources are relatively scarce, in general, and water resources per capita are only a quarter of the world’s average[1,2,3,4]
Protection of water resources in the processes of coal mining includes mainly three methods for achieving effective utilization of mine water: water conservation mining, underground reservoir storing, and simultaneous exploitation of coal and groundwater as resources. These methods have been widely applied for mine water utilization in coal mines in northern China[23,24,25,26], including water conservation mining in Shennan Mining Area, Shaanxi[27], underground reservoir construction and mine water utilization in Daliuta coal mine, Shaanxi[28], and simultaneous exploitation of coal and groundwater in Lu’an coalfield, Shanxi[29]
The optimal management technique has been widely used in many fields, such as engineering management and decision-making[30,31], and it has been applied for water resources management in coal mines in the past two decades, but, recently it shifted from solely relying on water supply to paying attention to increasing water supply, saving water resources, and managing water demand, as well as from single objective to multiple objective management[32,33,34,35,36]

Summary

Introduction

China’s water resources are relatively scarce, in general, and water resources per capita are only a quarter of the world’s average[1,2,3,4]. Continuous increasing of development scale of coal resources in this area has caused the changes of aquifer structure and conditions of groundwater recharge, flow and discharge, which in turn results in significantly declined water levels, dry aquifers, reduced or even disappeared flow of some springs[49]. These are due to decreased precipitation and increased mine drainage and water consumption of agriculture and industry every year. The study on water resources protection and optimal management is of vital importance for the sustainable use of water resources and balance environmental protection and industrial development in these regions

Methods

Results

Conclusion