Trabajo presentado en el 24 WGC. Disponible en CD en la biblioteca. Solicite este trabajo por email a biblio@iapg.org.ar

During the last decade many coal mines over the Europe have been abandoned for both economical and environmental reasons, others are in the terminal state of production. However some of these mines still contain large resources of methane that could be used for the local purposes like heating or electricity generation. This paper presents an approach to the computer simulation and forecasting of the methane production from working coal mines that is necessary for technical designing and economical assessments of such projects. The case study of the Moszczenica coal mine in Poland, including computer simulation of the methane production, is also reported to show that long history of the methane and coal recovery can be well reproduced by the simulation model. The calibrated model can be used for forecasting. Moszczenica coal mine is abandoned coal mine in Poland. Currently, the new project of improving methane production from Moszczenica coal mine is considered. The recovered gas could be used for production of heat and electricity. The main goal of the project will be production of methane from Moszczenica old goafs, using new wells drilled from the surface. The results of the computer simulation of the ventilation process are presented to show the predicted system performance and to find the optimal locations of the new wells. The mathematical model is briefly presented and important physical phenomena including double porosity nature of the coal and influence of the previous coal exploitation on the future methane production are discussed. The main goal of this paper is to show that methane from working or abandoned coal mines may be important source of energy and could be economically produced and utilized. In the paper, examples of effective use of methane in heating and power generation are also presented