China is currently the world's largest coal producer and consumer. It depends on coal for about 75 percent of its annual energy production and consumes about half the world coal production.

The estimated total reserves amount to 115 Gt in China. In 1997 it produced around 1.3 Gt of hard coal (World Coal Institute, December 1998). Between 100 and 200 Mt of high quality coal is consumed by spontaneous combustion every year. This amounts to approximately five to ten times of the Chinese annual export. The fires are so extensive that they produce about 2-3% of the total world carbon dioxide production due to fossil fuels.

China's very rich coal reserves are widely distributed across the country. However, fires are also widespread, stretching across the north of the country in a band that has a total length of 5000 kilometres and a width of 700 kilometres. Some of them have an extent for 20 kilometres. Others reach up to a depth of 100 meters. Some of Chinese coal fires have been dated to the Pleistocene Era. This map showing the distribution of coal fires in North China gives an idea of the extent of the problem of coal fires in China.

Because there are so many fires spread over such a vast area, detecting the fires is a major problem, especially as many of them occur in isolated areas, high in the mountain, in deserts and other inhospitable terrain.

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