Coal is an important and required energy source for today’s world. Current rates of world coal consumption are projected to continue at approximately the same (or greater) levels well into the twenty-first century. This paper will provide an introduction to the concept of coal systems analysis and the accompanying volume of papers will provide examples of how coal systems analysis can be used to understand, characterize, and evaluate coal and coal gas resources. Coal systems analysis incorporates the various disciplines of coal geology to provide a complete characterization of the resource. The coal system is divided into four stages: (1) accumulation, (2) preservation-burial, (3) diagenesis-coalification, and (4) coal and hydrocarbon resources. These stages are briefly discussed and key references and examples of the application of coal systems analysis are provided.

With the rapid development of the national economy, China’s demand for energy continues growing, and the contradiction between oil and gas supply and demand has become increasingly prominent. From a net exporter of crude oil in 1993 to an importer, China’s demand for crude oil import has increased year by year as domestic demand continues growing. In 2007, China’s net crude oil imports were 15928
104 t, a year-on-year increase of 14.7%. The external dependence of crude oil reached 46.05%. According to the forecast, like crude oil, natural gas will have a supply gap in recent years. CBM is an unconventional natural gas resource-rich and less developed in China. The total resource of CBM with a depth of less than 2000 m in China is 32.86
1012 m3 , of which the technically recoverable resource is 13.90
1012 m3

Coalbed gas has been considered a hazard since the early 19th century when the first mine gas explosions occurred in the United States in 1810 and France in 1845. In eastern Australia methane-related mine disasters occurred late in the 19th century with hundreds of lives lost in New South Wales, and as recently as 1995 in Queensland's Bowen Basin.

There is a vast literature on the topic of sediment transport, and, generally, the contributions to it fall into three categories: descriptive marine geological, process-oriented oceanographic, and empirical engineering. I admit this is a rather sweeping generalization but so often the engineering literature starts with dimensional reasoning and then obtains results from experiments to produce empirical relationships with little apparent attempt to relate the results to the natural environment. Conversely, the geological literature establishes some very good physical concepts but fails to quantify them sufficiently to turn them into valid theories. The oceanographic approach is to consider the driving fluid processes in the absence of a satisfactory view of the sedimentary response. Of course there are very notable exceptions to the above statements.