Holistic Approach to Clean Coal Energy Management

Coal mining results in significant effects to the environment that include large mine voids, contaminated water, and solid wastes. To counter these negative effects this paper suggests a holistic approach (HMI) to clean coal energy management, which focuses on using modified mine waste as backfill materials to transform mine voids into seismic isolation, carbon sequestration, and energy storage facilities. HMI represents a next generation green mining technique and requires that mining operations and infrastructure management collaborate closely. This collaboration can be made easy using advanced IT technologies. A hypothetical HMI scenario for Xuzhou is presented.