Advances of scientific and technological innovation of China’s coal industry during the 14th Five-Year Plan and considerations for the 15th Five-Year Plan development

The period of the 14th Five-Year Plan is a crucial stage for China’s coal industry to fulfill its core mission of ensuring energy security and accelerate its transformation towards intelligence, greenization, and integration, achieving high-quality development. This article systematically summarizes the major progress made in scientific and technological innovation in China’s coal industry during the 14th Five-Year Plan period, analyzes the new situation and challenges faced by the current industry development, and in light of national strategic demands and the laws of industrial evolution, proposes thoughts on the direction of scientific and technological innovation in the 15th Five-Year Plan period. During the 14th Five-Year Plan period, the scientific and technological innovation system of the coal industry has been continuously improved, and a series of major breakthroughs and landmark achievements have been made in ten key areas including geological exploration, mine construction, green mining, disaster prevention and control, coal mining equipment, intelligent coal mines, clean and efficient utilization, ecological restoration, energy conservation and environmental protection, and occupational health. The industry as a whole has achieved a major transformation from tracking and imitating to being on par and even leading in some fields. Currently, the international energy landscape is undergoing profound changes, and the domestic energy structure is accelerating its adjustment. Facing the new requirements of building an energy power and a modern industrial system in the 15th Five-Year Plan period, the development goals of scientific and technological innovation in the coal industry in the 15th Five-Year Plan period are proposed in three aspects: national security, energy transformation, and industry development. These include supporting the construction of a new energy system through the development of clean and efficient coal utilization, ensuring national energy security through promoting self-reliance and strength in coal science and technology, and leading industry transformation and upgrading through the expansion of AI applications to drive intelligent construction. Based on these three goals and the index requirements pointed out in relevant national industrial policies, six directions of thought for scientific and technological innovation in the coal industry in the 15th Five-Year Plan period are proposed: ① Deep coal resource extraction, focusing on breakthroughs in basic theories of mining at depth, safety guarantee technologies, and disruptive cutting-edge technologies; ② Achieving self-reliance and control of the industrial chain, fully promoting the domestic research and development and industrial application of large-scale open-pit continuous mining and stripping equipment, transportation equipment, self-reliant industrial control systems, and intelligent operation and maintenance platforms; ③ Clean and efficient utilization of coal, strengthening technological research and development in green mining, clean utilization, low-carbon conversion, and new coal-based materials; ④ Synergistic and integrated development of coal and new energy, upgrading mining areas into multi-energy complementary comprehensive energy bases by revitalizing mining area space resources, promoting clean energy substitution for production energy, and building an integrated source-grid-load-storage system; ⑤ Upgrading intelligent coal mine technology, breaking through the technical bottlenecks for stable and regular operation around intelligent tunneling, intelligent coal mining, intelligent open-pit mining and stripping, intelligent coal preparation, auxiliary transportation, and other systems, and achieving unmanned and less manned operations; ⑥ AI + coal related scenarios, promoting the in-depth application of AI technology in scenarios such as safe production, coal conversion, coal mining equipment manufacturing, knowledge graph construction, embodied intelligence, and auxiliary programming. Finally, five measures for building a high-level scientific and technological innovation system are proposed to form a continuous innovative force that promotes the high-quality development of the coal industry and supports the construction of Chinese-style modernization.