Coal mining is a major source of energy-related methane emissions; coal mine methane (CMM) governance is therefore relevant to climate mitigation and environmental sustainability. However, systematic evidence remains limited on how policy attention has evolved across China’s CMM policy system and how key design elements are configured within individual policies. This study examines the thematic evolution and policy design consistency of China’s CMM policies from 1988 to 2025. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was applied to 163 policy texts, and the Policy Modeling Consistency (PMC) Index was used to assess 12 selected policies. Four themes were identified: CMM extraction and utilization, coalbed methane resource planning and regulation, methane utilization and low-carbon transition, and coal mine gas safety management. Coal mine gas safety management remained recurrent, while methane utilization and low-carbon transition became more prominent in later years. The PMC assessment indicated acceptable-to-excellent overall consistency but uneven dimensional coverage; Policy Timeliness, Policy Instruments, and Policy Object had the lowest mean scores. These findings indicate that policy timeliness, instrument configuration, and target-actor specification warrant particular attention in future CMM policy design.

Coal mine construction projects have high risks, and non-compliant designs generated in the design stage will have adverse effects on subsequent construction and production stages. Therefore, it is of great importance to conduct effective preconstruction compliance inspections on coal mine construction designs. To make the compliance check of coal mine building design more rapid and effective, and to reduce the risks arising from the design phase, this study built a compliance inspection system for coal mine building design from the causes of coal mine accidents, using the Word2Vec word similarity calculation method and BIM platform secondary development technology. The system was tested and was found to be able to detect a 92.82% non-compliant component rate where the correct inspection rate was 97.68%. In addition, the inspection time for a single component was only 0.23 s. The construction of the compliance inspection system based on accident causes has changed the extensive inspection mode in the traditional manual model inspection, and the inspection no longer depends on the experience of inspectors, thus improving the efficiency and accuracy of coal mine building model inspection. The inspection focuses on the building elements with high risks, which achieves the purpose of risk control in the design stage.