The report is a review of published information pertaining to the abatement of harmful drainage from underground coal mines. Reviewed are new physical approaches to the problem of interdicting water entry into coal mines. These include land management for surface and sub-surface water diversion, the exploitation of water carrying strata, and new mining methods. Some chemical approaches to abatement reviewed include the use of silica gel solutions underground to prevent acid formation, the use of inert gas in active mines, and the use of new and the refinement of known grouting agents.

This book accompanies you on a journey that starts with the basics of mine water treatment and takes you further through correct sampling for planning to active and passive systems. In the respective chapters you will learn the most important techniques about the parameters to be measured (e.g. on-site parameters, flow rate), which methods are available to actively treat your mine water (e.g. high density sludge method, reverse osmosis, ion exchange) and which ones to perform passive treatment (e.g. constructed wetlands, vertical flow reactor, limestone channel). You will also get an insight into the use of mine water. Don’t expect a cookbook – rather, it’s an ingredients and utensils list to help you find the right recipe. For extended help on this, check out the more than 1000 references on all the techniques presented. I wrote this book for hydrogeologists, engineers, graduate students, government officials, miners, geoecologists, chemical engineers – in the broadest sense: you. This book is a translation of an original German edition. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision and a thorough copy editing and update by the author ensured that the contents are correctly represented.