This photo taken on Aug. 1, 2024 shows the working area of the Huayang No. 2 Coal Mine in Yangquan City, north China's Shanxi Province. (Photo: Xinhua)

China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the country's top economic planner, on Monday approved a regulation on the planning and management of the nation's coal mining areas, as part of broader efforts to enhance coal resource utilization and securing a reliable energy supply. The new regulation will take effect on February 1, 2025.

For coal production areas with a total mining capacity exceeding 10 million tons annually, the comprehensive mining plan should first be reviewed by provincial coal mining management departments, and subsequently submitted to the NDRC for review and approval, the regulation said. The benchmark for NDRC approval is 3 million tons of coal, according to the previous version of the regulation, effective from July 3, 2012.

The new regulation relaxes approval standards for new coal mines to increase approval efficiency, which will ensure the nation has a stable supply of energy resources, Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, told the Global Times on Monday, noting that it emphasizes the importance of coal in China's energy structure. 

The regulation rules that coalmines with a total capacity of 10 million tons or less annually are subject to the approval of provincial coal mining management departments, and must be filed with the NDRC and National Energy Administration (NEA) for record.

The regulation states that in production areas that are critical to national strategies and national economic development, mining plans could be organized and implemented by the NDRC and the NEA. 

China continues to pursue its "dual-carbon" goals by increasing new-energy power capacity, while maintaining thermal coal power as a critical backup for energy supply, experts said.

NEA's latest data shows that by the end of November 2024, China's total installed power generation capacity reached 3.23 billion kilowatts, a year-on-year increase of 14.4 percent, with thermal coal capacity reaching 1.43 billion kilowatts.

Li Chunlin, an official from the NDRC, said during a press conference on October 8, that China has sufficient coal stock for peak winter use, and vowed to add supply of coal and natural gas. 

In the first 10 months of this year, the national raw coal output by large-scale enterprises amounted to 3.89 billion tons, marking a 1.2 percent year-on-year increase, the highest level recorded for the same period.

In terms of coal transportation, since November, China's railways have completed an average of 87,680 coal transports per day, a year-on-year increase of 3.3 percent, the Xinhua News Agency reported.