Once upon a time, the Heidaigou mining area was filled with yellow sand and difficult to grow grass. Nowadays, with the landing of a national ecological restoration project in this black coal sea, cutting-edge technology is making barren land green again, and a green transformation from experience planting trees to technology empowerment is quietly unfolding.

Over thirty years of thick planting with a green background color

The Shenhua Heidaigou open-pit coal mine in China is located in the core area of the northern sand prevention zone, and its ecological location is extremely sensitive. The landing of the national key research and development demonstration project here is not accidental, but rather the accumulation of more than 30 years of ecological governance by Zhuneng Group. From the early years of sandstorms and barren landforms, to the current reclamation and greening of over 100000 acres, with a significant increase in animal and plant species, capable people have written the green legend of Coal Sea Saihanba through perseverance and hard work, and have also laid a solid foundation for undertaking higher-level technological demonstration projects.

Three major technologies directly addressing pain points in governance

The ecological restoration of northern mining areas has long faced common challenges such as water scarcity, poor soil quality, and weak self-sustaining capacity of ecosystems. The traditional high investment, low efficiency, and unsustainable governance model has reached a bottleneck. This national level project relies on the integrated model of industry, academia, research and application, focusing on precise tackling in three directions: three-dimensional water conservation, soil creation and activation, and system restoration: capturing water vapor in the air to solve the problem of water shortage, transforming industrial solid waste such as coal gangue into high-quality active soil layers, and building a multi-level symbiotic system to achieve long-term ecological sustainability. These technological paths have completely reversed the dependence on manual maintenance and provided systematic and replicable solutions for green governance in mining areas. Keywords: Northern Sand Control Zone, Mining Area, Technological Restoration, Coal Green Symbiosis

Coordinated development of energy and ecology

This project explores a new path that balances energy security and ecological security. The relationship between coal development and ecological protection is not an either or opposition, but a necessary answer that complements each other. The practice in Heidaigou shows that currently, as technology moves from the laboratory to the waste dump site, traditional mining areas can fully achieve a synergistic win-win situation of ecological loss reduction and resource development when technology driven replaces experience driven.

The landing of the national brand project in Heidaigou marks the official entry of the mining area's ecological restoration into a new stage driven by technology. This standardized and scalable restoration model not only provides a full chain green solution for numerous open-pit mining areas in the northern sand prevention zone, but also injects solid technological support into the battle of the Three North Project.Editor/Gong Ziwei