Background The coal industry serves as a ballast and stabilizer for China's rapid economic and social development, as well as ensuring national energy security. China boasts abundant coal resource reserves, but these are characterized by uneven spatial distribution, diverse coal seam occurrences, complex geological structures, and significant differences in mining conditions. During coal mining and extraction processes, unclear geological conditions often lead to abandoned tunneling roads, tight mining and extraction sequences, frequent equipment relocations, and sudden concealed geological disasters, ultimately resulting in the inability to advance the working face normally, frequent casualties, and significant economic losses. Geological support is a crucial foundation and key technology in the processes of coal mine construction, design, development, tunneling, and extraction, playing a role in risk prevention and control, as well as ensuring high yield and efficiency.

Method Against the backdrop of national economic construction and coal industry development, geological support is reviewed in stages and characteristics, summarizing the technical features and levels of geological support that emerged under specific historical backgrounds and production modes.

Progress  (1) The early days of the People's Republic of China marked the embryonic stage centered on "geological support for coal resource exploration," addressing the issue of regional evaluation and prediction of coal resources in China. The "Ninth Five-Year Plan" period represented the initial stage centered on "geological support for high-yield and high-efficiency mine construction," serving mine design, construction, and extraction work. Since the 21st century, it has matured into the stage centered on "geological support for safe and efficient coal production," with significant advancements in detection accuracy, distance, range, and timeliness. After 2014, it entered a new development stage centered on "geological support for intelligent coal mining," achieving breakthroughs in dynamic detection during tunneling and mining, and developing a professional-grade transparent geological support cloud platform. (2) Geological support technology has played a positive role in coal resource prediction, mine design optimization, extraction safety support, disaster prevention and control, personnel reduction, quality improvement, and efficiency enhancement.

Outlook  Currently, artificial intelligence is leading a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation. Geological support technology must actively embrace AI technology, continue to break through the "bottleneck" challenges in technology research and equipment manufacturing, and drive technological progress in real-time precise advanced perception, transparent geological digitalization, and multi-disaster collaborative precise management with AI technology. The development of the coal industry has promoted technological innovation and breakthroughs in geological support, which in turn fosters the safe, efficient, green, and intelligent development of the coal industry. The mutual achievements of both have made remarkable contributions to China's national economic development.