At four in the morning, the lights in the geophysical survey team’s office at Wuhai Energy Tianrong Company cut through the darkness. Captain Liu Bo had just sent the last detection map to the mine. The dense clusters of anomaly coordinates on the screen were the result of hours spent by him and his team crouching in waterlogged tunnels, checking each point with handheld detectors.

“Giving the mine a full ‘health check’ allows no room for error,” Liu said. When the team was formed in 2019, its seven young members, average age thirty-two, relied solely on equipment manuals and repeated practice in abandoned tunnels. Today, they have completed 210,000 meters of geophysical surveying, using technology to “see through” geological strata and draw accurate maps for safe mining.

At six in the morning, Zhang Ziliang, head of the intelligent operation and maintenance team at Shengdong Coal’s Shigetai Mine, is already in front of his computer. The pulsing figures on the screen are the equipment’s “health report”. “Even the slightest abnormality can affect production across the entire workface,” he said.

This winter’s peak-load season coincides with the critical period of relocating equipment from old workfaces to new ones. Zhang and his team have worked around the clock, turning the office into a second home, with instant noodles as a nightly staple. “An extra hour of production means an extra batch of coal,” he said. He knows he is safeguarding more than just data,but the light and warmth of thousands of households.

At Heidaigou Open-pit Coal Mine, Liu Yonggang has completed a transformation from steering wheels to intelligent joysticks. After driving mining trucks for twenty years, he can now direct a three-story-high autonomous truck with a click of the mouse. To master this new skill, he spent all his spare time studying, filling thick notebooks with system parameters; the edges of the pages are already worn soft.

In 2024, he won the national mining production control skills championship. “From the steering wheel to the control console, I’m lucky to witness this era of change, and I must be worthy of it,” he said. Standing in the control center, watching the driverless truck haul crushed rock toward the waste dump, he felt a surge of emotion.

The stories of these new coal workers are a vivid reflection of CHN Energy’s push to advance intelligent transformation across the coal industry. Through technological innovation, they are injecting new vitality into a traditional sector and writing a new chapter in ensuring energy supply from deep beneath the earth.