Experimental study on evaluation of underground coal gasification with a horizontal hole using two different coals

•The ex-situ UCG experiments were carried out with different coal samples.•The elevated injection rate of the oxygen enriched air was adopted.•The movement of gasification area was analyzed with temperature/AE source location.•The amount of the reacted carbon was estimated with the volume of oxygen injected. Underground coal gasification (UCG) is a technique to extract coal energy with heat energy and combustible gases through chemical reactions in the underground gasifier. In this study, an application of a coaxial UCG system with a horizontal hole is discussed by means of the model UCG experiments with a large-scale simulated coal seam having dimensions of 550 × 600 × 2740 mm. The two types of coal having 30.18 MJ/kg of calorific value with 7.9% of ash (type 1) and 22.66 MJ/kg of calorific value with 28.3% of ash (type 2) were used for the experiments to evaluate the effect of coal quality on temperature distribution of the gasification area and product gas quality. The oxygen-enriched air was used. The injection rate of the gasification agents was elevated during the experiments to analyze the effect on the product gas. The results show that the gasification area is expanded along the wall of a coaxial hole, not upwards for the type 2 coal with high ash content. The average calorific value of product gas for types 1 and 2 is 8.05 MJ/m3 and 6.91 MJ/m3 respectively, while an increase of injection flow rate produces an improvement of the calorific value for both types of coal. Additionally, it is suggested that the reacted carbon and the product gas volume can be estimated with the volume of oxygen injected regardless of the coal quality if the gasification efficiency and the reaction temperature are similar. These results help to estimate several important parameters, e.g. reacted coal amount, recovered gas volume, and recovered energy from the coal when the actual field implementation is designed.