Status and prospects of underground coal mining technology in Vietnam

Underground coal mining in Vietnam plays an important role to not only the sustainable coal industry but also the energy and social security in this country. Although the Vietnam coal industry has produced 35–45 million tonnes of raw coal per annum in past ten years, a great volume of coal resources remains distributed in complex geo-mining conditions and mostly unmined. This paper presents a brief review of the current and potential technologies for cutting coal and controlling roof in Vietnam underground coal mines. From the review, it is concluded that there is an urgent demand on improvement of current technologies as well as on investigation for effective application of more advanced mining methods into the industry, especially for deep mining at Red River Delta—the largest coal basin in Vietnam.