Coal Fires: A Global Disaster

The phenomenon is all but known: under certain conditions, still very common even in modern-day mining, coal can spontaneously ignite in an exothermic process. The fires springing from such combustion are insidious indeed. Though occurring all over the world, wreaking havoc on a particularly large scale in mining areas of South and East Asia, they have so far slipped public attention – this despite a host of dire economic and environmental consequences that, even at a global level, should hardly go unnoticed.

While easily identifiable as an obstacle to mining and mine safety, coal fires are above all a stealthy source of toxic and greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon dioxide and monoxide, as well as methane, to name only the most prominent, threaten the health of people working and living in fire areas. More importantly, they are bound to have a disastrous effect on local, regional, and global climate. This alone warrants immediate extinction efforts and heightened global attention – from scientists, politicians, as well as the general public!

Sino-German Efforts at Coal Fire Mitigation

With an output of over 2.4 billion t per year, China is the world’s largest producer of raw coal. National exports and energy markets are highly dependent on the fuel; a dependence which is likely to increase if the Chinese economy continues to grow at its current pace. And yet, millions of tons of the precious resource are destroyed each year in coal seam fires, burning uncontrolled in a giant "Coal Fire Belt" from the ragged mountains of western Xinjiang to the plains of Inner Mongolia. And even more is lost for mining as vehicles and machines are barred from recoverable reserves by the fires.

These alarming proportions are due, in part, to the complexities of the phenomenon: extinguishing underground coal seam fires is an extremely difficult, time-consuming, and costly enterprise if meant to be sustainable. Even large-scale efforts often fail since they lack a thorough scientific understanding of the processes leading up to and controlling coal fire development. The Sino-German Coal Fire Research Initiative "Innovative Technologies for Exploration, Extinction, and Monitoring of Coal Fires in North China" was launched in autumn 2003 to address this patent lack of knowledge.

In a first three-year phase, expert teams from a number of Chinese and German research institutes (see the project's website www.coalfire.caf.dlr.de) set out to explore the notorious coal fire areas, in China’s north, investigating the basic mechanisms and parameters that underlie coal spontaneous combustion and fire propagation. The results of their work were presented at the International Conference on Coal Fire Research, held under UNESCO auspices in Beijing 2005; they have been published in a monograph, the ERSEC Ecological Book Series – 4, which can be downloaded from: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0015/001595/159538M.pdf

A second conference is now to follow up on the Beijing success and develop in more detail and depth the subjects broached then. Scheduled for 19 to 21 May 2010 at ddb forum berlin, Germany, the event will serve once again both as a platform for the Sino-German Coal Fire Research Initiative and as a meeting point for international coal fire experts. Its content and structure will be largely inspired by the project’s second phase from 2006 to 2009 (extended to 2010).

During this phase, novel approaches to coal fire fighting and funding were made a prime concern in the collaborative effort. The Clean Develop Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol, for example, has been identified as a viable tool for making fire extinction a profitable undertaking. The Second International Conference on Coal Fire Research (ICCFR2), hence, will attempt to foster coal fire mitigation and prevention by bridging the science, economics, and politics of coal fires. Its ultimate objective is to take international scientific cooperation on the subject to a new integrated level!