The Relationship between China's Coal Resource Development and Water Resource

Coal resource is one of the energy resources with large reserves in the world, and its exploitation and consumption rank among the highest energy development. China is both a great coal producer and consumer. Due to rapid economic and social development as well as resource distribution characteristics with more coal and less oil, coal energy will always dominate China's energy consumption. However, water resource, as the support element and basic ecological element of coal development, is both accelerated and affected by the exploitation of coal resource, which has caused a series of problems related to water. In the face of water deficit as well as large demand of coal resource and its influence on water resource and ecological environment during its exploitation, therefore, this paper analyzes the functional relation between coal energy development and water resource in terms of the space distribution of China's coal and water resources, the consumption of coal resource exploitation on water resource and a series of problems caused; and puts forward the countermeasures to coordinate regional economic, ecological and environmental development based on balanced development of coal production and consumption areas by synthesizing the reverse distribution of such space distribution and the unbalanced distribution characteristics of coal consumption and production areas. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license