This paper analyzes and summarizes the construction of geological assurance system for China's coal mine safety and efficient mining during the past 40 years. With the transformation of the coal industry from blast mining and conventional machine mining to mechanized mining, it has experienced the development from coal field geology to the development of mining engineering geology and mine engineering geophysical prospecting, and gradually constructed the basic framework of geological assurance system for coal mine safety and efficient mining. In the mid-to-late 1990s, with the establishment and improvement of the research results of high-resolution 3D seismic exploration technology in coal mining areas, the detection precision and prediction accuracy of coal mine fine geological structure, coal and gas outburst, mine water inrush channel and other hazards are greatly improved, which promote the rapid development of coal mine safety and efficient mines in China, and the geological assurance system for coal mine safety and efficient mining has also matured and is popularized and applied in the coal industry in China. Although the coal mine geological assurance system has achieved significant results in ensuring mining safety and improving mining efficiency, with the deep integration of information technology and the further improvement of the mechanization level of coal mines, the green coal mining, intelligent and precise mining, etc. have put forward higher requirements to geological assurance system for the coal mine safety and efficient mining. It is believed that mine geological transparency is the current development direction of geological assurance system for coal mine safety and efficient mining. The current key tasks are as follows: ① on the basis of unified data fusion, further improving the exploration accuracy and the transparency of mine geology, and building a coal mine intelligent mining geological support platform; ② developing high-resolution coal and rock identification equipment integrated with inertial navigation technology to achieve accurate identification of coal and rock structures within 5 meters in front of the working face; ③ based on the rock layer structure, focusing on rock mechanics and fluid factors, developing and establishing an intelligent mine construction decision-making and disaster hidden danger forecasting system. © 2020, Editorial Office of Journal of China Coal Society. All right reserved.
