Where the World Digs Coal — The Global Coal Mine Map, Explained

It shows the world's coal mines — 5,154 of them — from the Global Coal Mine Tracker, a project that tries to catalogue every significant coal mine on Earth. We draw three kinds: mines that are operating, mines that are mothballed (built but temporarily idle), and mines that are proposed (planned but not yet dug). Cancelled and shelved projects are left off. Each mine is a chunk of coal coloured by the rank of coal it produces, and sized by how much it can produce in a year, so the biggest producing mines stand out. We deliberately show no operator or owner — this is a map of where coal is, not who profits from it.

It's completely real, and it's the single most important thing the map tells you. China runs nearly half of all the coal mines in this dataset — more than the rest of the world combined — with India, Indonesia, the United States, Russia and Australia making up most of the remainder. It's worth being clear about why we trust that lopsided picture, because on some of our other maps a similar skew is a data artifact. On the oil-and-gas-field map, for instance, the raw data was about 80% United States purely because a bulk import had added thousands of tiny American fields — so we had to filter it. Coal is different: the Global Coal Mine Tracker is a deliberately curated near-census, covering roughly 95% of world production, built mine by mine rather than dumped in bulk. So the concentration you see isn't a mapping bias — China genuinely mines, and burns, about half the world's coal. That single fact shapes the entire global picture of energy and emissions.

They show the rank of the coal. Coal isn't one substance — it's a family, formed as ancient peat is buried and squeezed over millions of years, climbing in 'rank' as it goes: drier, denser, more carbon, more energy per tonne. The map runs that ladder as a colour ramp. Lignite, or brown coal, is the youngest and lowest — warm brown on the map. Subbituminous is a step up. Bituminous is the workhorse, the everyday coal of power stations and steelmaking, and most of the world's mines produce it — a neutral grey. Anthracite is the top of the ladder: the hardest, oldest, highest-carbon coal, with an almost metallic lustre — so we draw it a pale, lustrous silver. The brown-to-silver ramp is roughly the journey from young, wet, low-grade coal to old, hard, high-grade coal.

Because the future of coal is being decided right now, and leaving the proposed mines off would hide the most important part of the story. The 'proposed' mines are the expansion pipeline — coal projects that are planned but not yet operating, concentrated heavily in China and India. We draw them fainter than the operating mines, so you can tell at a glance what already exists from what's merely planned, and each mine's tap card states its status plainly. Showing them matters because every proposed mine is a decision point: a country can still choose not to build it. Leaving them invisible would make the world's coal footprint look more fixed, and smaller, than it really is.

Burning coal releases carbon dioxide — that's the famous part. But coal seams also hold methane, a greenhouse gas far more powerful than CO₂ over the short term, and the act of mining lets that methane escape straight into the atmosphere before any coal is even burned. The Global Coal Mine Tracker estimates the mines on this map leak on the order of 77 million tonnes of methane a year. The detail that stops you short is that the proposed mines alone — coal still in the planning stage — account for roughly 17 million tonnes of that. In other words, a large chunk of the climate damage from new coal is locked in the moment the mine opens, independent of how much coal is eventually burned. It's a reason the 'proposed' layer is more than a curiosity.