opencast coal mine at Cerrejón

Australia
Coal is mined in every state of Australia as well as the Northern Territory. It is mostly used to generate electricity, and 75% of annual coal production is exported, mostly to eastern Asia. Coal provides about 85% of Australia's electricity production. In 2007, 428 million short tons of coal was mined in Australia.

India
In India Coal is mined in the states of Jharkhand, West Bengal, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Chhatisgarh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Assam and Meghalaya.

China
The People's Republic of China is by far the largest producer of coal in the world, producing over 2.8 billion tons of coal in 2007, or approximately 39.8 percent of all coal produced in the world during that year. For comparison, the second largest producer, the United States, produced more than 1.1 billion tons in 2007. An estimated 5 million people work in China's coal-mining industry. As many as 20,000 miners die in accidents each year.
Most Chinese mines are deep underground and do not produce the surface disruption typical of strip mines. Although there is some evidence of reclamation of mined land for use as parks, China does not require extensive reclamation and is creating significant acreages of abandoned mined land which is unsuitable for agriculture or other human uses, and inhospitable to indigenous wildlife. Chinese underground mines often experience severe surface subsidence (6–12 meters), negatively impacting farmland because it no longer drains well. China uses some subsidence areas for aquaculture ponds but has more than they need for that purpose. Reclamation of subsided ground is a significant problem in China.
Because most Chinese coal is for domestic consumption and is burned with little or no air pollution control equipment, it contributes greatly to visible smoke and severe air pollution in industrial areas using coal for fuel.

Colombia
Some of the world's largest coal reserves are located in South America, and an opencast mine at Cerrejón in Colombia is one of the world's largest open pit mines. Output of the mine in 2004 was 24.9 million tons (compared to total global hard coal production of 4,600 million tons). Cerrejón contributed about half of Colombia's coal exports of 52 million tons that year, with Colombia ranked sixth among major coal exporting nations. The company planned to expand production to 32 million tons by 2008.
The company has its own 150 km standard-gauge railroad, connecting the mine to its coal-loading terminal at Puerto Bolívar on the Caribbean coast. There are two 120-car unit trains, each carrying 12,000 tons of coal per trip. The round-trip time for each train, including loading and unloading, is about 12 hours. The coal facilities at the port are capable of loading 4,800 tons per hour on to vessels of up to 175,000 tons of dead weight. The mine, railroad and port operate 24 hours per day. Cerrejón directly employs 4,600 workers, with a further 3,800 employed by contractors. The reserves at Cerrejón are low-sulfur, low-ash, bituminous coal. The coal is mostly used for electric power generation, with some also used in steel manufacture. The surface mineable reserves for the current contract are 330 million tons. However, total proven reserves to a depth of 300 metres are 3,000 million tons.

South Africa
South Africa is one of the ten largest coal producing and the fourth largest coal exporting country in the world.

United Kingdom 
Coal mining in the United States is a major industry, and reached an all-time high of 1.06 Gt (1.17 billion short tons) in 2008, being mined in 25 states. The US was a net exporter of coal in 2008, with the surplus of exports over imports equalling 4% of the total mined.

United States
The American share of world coal production remained steady at about 20% from 1980 to 2005, at about 1 billion short tons per year.
In a conference with the West Virginia Coal Association former President George W. Bush said that there is no more reliable source of electricity than coal and put coal at center of US energy independence.

Ukraine
More than 90% of Ukraine’s coal production comes from the Donets Basin. The country's coal industry employs about 500,000 people.