GRID · COAL MINES
Where the World Digs Coal
Most of the maps in this canvas are about clean energy. This one is about the dirtiest fuel of all. There are 5,154 operating, mothballed and proposed coal mines on this map, and where they are is anything but even: China alone runs nearly 49% of them. The chunks are coloured by the rank of the coal — brown lignite through to lustrous anthracite — and sized by how much each mine can produce. It’s the clearest picture of the world’s most stubborn carbon habit.
Where the world digs coal
Coal mining is extraordinarily concentrated. China runs more coal mines than the rest of the world combined, with India, Indonesia, the United States, Russia and Australia making up most of the rest. This is not a mapping artefact— the tracker is a curated near-census of world coal, so the lopsided picture is the real one (it’s the opposite of the US-skewed oil-and-gas-field map, where a bulk data import had to be filtered out).
The ranks of coal
Not all coal is the same. As coal is buried and compressed over millions of years it climbs in rank— drier, denser, more carbon, more energy. The map colours each mine by the rank it produces, from brown lignite up to the hard, almost metallic anthracite. Most of the world’s mines produce bituminous coal, the everyday fuel of power stations and steelmaking.
About 58% of these mines go underground for their coal and about 39% strip it from the surface in vast open pits — you can read which on each mine’s tap card.
The methane the coal leaks
Burning coal is only half its climate cost. Coal seams hold methane — a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide over the short term — and mining releases it straight to the air. The tracker estimates the mines on this map leak roughly 77 million tonnes of methane a year. The most striking part: the proposedmines — coal that isn’t even being dug yet — account for about 17 million tonnes of that, a reminder that the climate cost of new coal is locked in before the first tonne is mined.
About this data
Mine data comes from the Global Coal Mine Tracker by Global Energy Monitor (CC BY 4.0). We show the mines that are operating, mothballed or proposed — the existing fleet plus the expansion pipeline — and leave out cancelled and shelved projects. Each mine is coloured by coal rank and sized by its annual capacity in million tonnes a year, reported for about 76% of them; the rest draw at a small floor size, never an invented number. Proposed mines are drawn fainter, because they aren’t built yet. Unlike some of our other layers this one needs nonotability filter: the tracker is a curated near-census of world coal, so China’s near-half share is the genuine picture, not a data skew. We show no operator or owner. Compiled 2026-06-27.