China's top work safety official said on Tuesday that the death toll for each million tons of coal produced fell to 1.05 people in the first half of 2008, from 1.485 for all of 2007 and 3.08 for 2005.

The decline mainly reflected better gas control, State Administration of Work Safety head Wang Jun told a national conference on colliery gas control.

Gas-induced blasts have been a major cause of coal mine fatalities.

All coal mines with high concentration of gas have been equipped with systems to monitor the gas intensity, Wang said. Such systems also covered 92.5 percent of the mines with low gas concentration.

In the first half of this year, 81 gas-related accidents were reported nationwide, claiming 294 lives, according to Wang. Those figures were 43 percent and 48.3 percent, respectively, lower than a year earlier.

Yet, the million ton mortality at small mines last year was eight times that of large state-owned collieries, Zhang Guobao, deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), told the meeting.

"About 2,500 lives could have been spared if safety control measures at small coal mines were as strict as at large state-owned ones," Zhang said.

Among 16,000 mines nationwide, about 90 percent were small -- with an annual capacity below 300,000 tons -- where safety controls were usually lax, according to Zhang.

"Safety control at coal mines remains an arduous task," Chen said. He said the agency would continue with gas control and safety supervision at large state-owned collieries, while upgrading safety at small ones.

In a move to promote clean coal and improve mine safety records, China has closed 116,000 small coal mines over the past two years.

The country also stepped up coalbed methane (CBM) development to make better use of gas reserves at coal mines.

China expected to increase its proven CBM reserves by 300 billion cubic meters in the five years ending in 2010, under a five-year NDRC plan. The proven reserves stood at 134 billion cubic meters at the end of last year.

China would also extract 10 billion cubic meters of CBM and build 10 CBM pipelines with a designed capacity of 6.5 billion cubic meters. China began construction on its first CBM pipeline last week. The line will link north China's Shanxi Province with the west-east natural gas pipeline, capable of carrying 3 billion cubic meters of CBM each year.

Zhang said on Tuesday that development plans for two key CBM industrial bases at the Ordos and Qinshui basins in northern China would be published soon.

(Xinhua News Agency July 9, 2008)