Abstract:
Coal and co-associated energy minerals are strategic resources essential for national energy security and exhibit widespread characteristics of co-occurrence and spatial superposition. Achieving green, safe, efficient, and intelligent collaborative development is vital for ensuring long-term resource stability and supply security. This study analyzes the major challenges in engineering geological assurance, mineral rights delineation, geological responses during co-mining, and the development of digital–intelligent mining technologies and equipment. Key technical difficulties are identified, including sensing multiphase–multifield strata responses, coordinating multi-stage mining processes, characterizing groundwater disturbance and flow redistribution, controlling pollutant migration, and managing disaster prevention and emergency response. The results indicate that the “AI+” paradigm will serve as an important pathway for future resource development. An unmanned intelligent co-mining model is proposed to address the distinctive reservoir responses under high temperature, high hydraulic pressure, high geostress, low permeability, and strong disturbance feedback. By integrating intelligent sensing, data fusion, and intelligent decision-making technologies, multimodal paradigm models and multi-scenario disaster prediction and emergency control models are constructed to reveal the mechanisms of disaster initiation and evolution under coupled multiphysics conditions. An embodied-robot and edge-computing cluster is further developed to establish a bidirectional data network, and a resilient, self-healing heterogeneous data system combining distributed and centralized structures is formed through multi-source machine learning, enabling precise human–machine collaborative and autonomous decision-making and supporting the development of a “mine heart–mine brain–mine body” digital–intelligent paradigm. Focusing on four key scientific problems—multiphysics coupling and disaster mechanisms, integrated process technologies for collaborative mining, ecological restoration and chain-type emergency response, and digital–intelligent network and equipment architecture—six major research directions are outlined, including efficient resource extraction and safety assurance, disturbance mitigation technologies, groundwater regulation and pollutant migration control, mine-water pollution prevention and utilization, unmanned intelligent mining construction, and three-dimensional functional development of underground spaces. These efforts provide technical support for pilot demonstration projects and promote the large-scale, high-quality development of collaborative mining of coal and co-associated energy minerals.