Advances in Optimization and Modelling of Coal Mining

Dear Colleagues,

Global coal production amounted to approximately 175 exajoules (10¹⁸ J) in 2022, which represents a 75% increase since the beginning of the 21st century, while global electric energy production has doubled since then. The most populous countries like China and India continue to develop fossil-fuelled power generation projects that, in contrast, are being abandoned in the EU due to rigorous climate protection policies. Looking globally, the rising scale of coal mining—one of the most energy-exhausting and environmentally aggressive branches of the economy—introduces challenges for researchers. Optimisation efforts of coal mining operations should be targeted to both improving the overall efficiency and mitigating their environmental impact. One methods for decreasing carbon emissions from fossil-fuelled power plants is the co-firing of coal and biomass; however, this creates a set of hazard and handling problems to be solved. The rapidly increasing share of unstable RESs has created the need to address the temporal and random surpluses and shortages of RESs by providing effective methods of balancing them. The coal-fuelled power generation complex contains various and not yet utilised possibilities of energy supply (not only directly from burning the coal) or storage with the use of intensive energy-consuming operations that can be controlled considering the interim needs of balancing the electric energy in the grid.

These problems encourage researchers to begin investigations with novel modelling and calculating methods applying online data acquisition, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence algorithms to build effective digital twins of coal-fuelled power complexes that can help to achieve a higher level of sustainable electric energy generation comprising renewable and fossil-fuelled sources.

The proposed topics of this Special Issue of Energies are:

1. Energy policy;
2. Coal assets policy;
3. Energy security;
4. Coal-bed methane;
5. Energy audit of coal handling mine and power plant;
6. Coal energy sources for present and future;
7. Coal-fired energy dilemma;
8. Coal combustion efficiency;
9. Clean coal technology;
10. Energy climate nexus;
11. Geoeconomics of coal;
12. Coal and biomass handling and cofiring.

Dr. Witold Kawalec
Dr. Leszek Jurdziak
Guest Editors

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