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Coal-Based Environmental Problems in a Low-Rainfall Tropical Region
Published in Robert F. Keefer, Kenneth S. Sajwan, Trace Elements in Coal and Coal Combustion Residues, 2020
M. Agrawal, J. Singh, A. K. Jha, J. S. Singh
Coal mining in India started in the year 1774 in the Raniganj coalfield, and by the year 1830 several additional mines had developed in that area. By the end of the 19th century, coal mining had started in Assam, Singreni, Warda Valley, Jharia, and central India. Systematic work in coal mines received a boost following nationalization of mines in 1971 and 1973. The total coal production for India during 1989–1990 was 226 million metric tons. Open-cast coal mining contributed about 56% of the current coal production and will contribute about 60% by 2000 A.D. Coal India Ltd. has projected a total land requirement for coal mining of 116,691.60 ha by 1994–1995, of which 31.18% is presently forest land. In China, the area of land disturbed by mining is about 2 million ha and the rate of land degradation due to mining is 2000 ha/year; by the end of the century this rate will exceed 33,000 ha/year.6
A time series decomposition approach to detect coal fires in parts of the Gondwana coalfields of India from VIIRS data
Published in Journal of Spatial Science, 2023
Ritesh Mujawdiya, R. S. Chatterjee, Dheeraj Kumar
India has third ranking in global coal production and second ranking in global coal consumption (BP 2021). Commercial coal mining in India was reportedly started in 1774 in Raniganj Coalfield, situated in West Bengal state (Singh and Yadav 1995). Due to unscientific mining techniques, Indian coal mining companies faced the problem of coal fires. The first coal fire incident occurred in India in 1916 in the Jharia coalfield situated in Jharkhand state (Michalski et al. 1997), and coal fires are still occurring. Most coal fires occur due to the spontaneous combustion of coal (Misra and Singh 1994). When coal gets in contact with oxygen, the heat is liberated. If there is no passage of heat in the atmosphere, it accumulates and raises the temperature at the surface of coal. The process of increase in temperature continues and the coal gets ignited. Coal fires are notoriously recognised for destroying prime coking coal, causing land subsidence, which results in lethal accidents to the people residing in the coalfield area (Chatterjee et al. 2015), making agricultural land infertile, releasing harmful gases in the atmosphere, which subsequently become root cause of health problems to the local residents (Finkelman 2004, Kolker et al. 2009), and creating obstacles for new coal production. The knowledge of underground coal fires enables the government and agencies involved in mining operations to take action on securing the unburnt coal resources and resettlement of the affected population in coal fire affected areas. It has been reported that extinguished coal fires may start burning again within a few weeks (Kuenzer et al. 2013). Therefore, their monitoring at appropriate intervals can help the concerned departments and agencies make timely action plans to tackle potentially dangerous coal fires. Most previous studies have detected coal fires with an interval of more than 1 year, e.g. Martha et al. (2010) detected coal fires in 2003 and 2006 at 3-year interval, Pandey et al. (2017) detected coal fires during 1988–2013 with consecutive five-year intervals, and Singh et al. (2021) detected coal fires for 2006, 2009, and 2015. The present study monitors coal fires at consecutive 1-year time interval from wide-swath data. However, with the availability of wide-swath data on a daily basis, the proposed algorithm can be used to monitor coal fires at shorter intervals.