  Coal mines are globally an important source of methane and also one of the
largest point sources of methane. We present a high-resolution 0.1deg x 0.1deg
bottom-up gridded emission inventory for methane emissions from coal mines in
India and Australia, which are among the top five coal-producing countries in
2018. The aim is to reduce the uncertainty in local coal mine methane emissions
and to improve the spatial localization to support monitoring and mitigation of
these emissions. For India, we improve the spatial allocation of the emissions
by identifying the exact location of surface and underground coal mines and we
use a tier-2 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) methodology to
estimate the emissions from each coal mine using country-specific emission
factors. For Australia, we estimate the emission for each coal mine by
distributing the state-level reported total emissions using proxies of coal
production and the coal basin-specific gas content profile of underground
mines. Comparison of our total coal mine methane emission from India with
existing global inventories showed our estimates are about a factor 3 lower,
but well within the range of the national Indian estimate reported to the
United Nations framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC). For both
countries, the new spatial distribution of the emissions shows a large
difference from the global inventories. Our improved emissions dataset will be
useful for air quality or climate modeling and while assessing the satellite
methane observations.
