a. The areas having the conditions for the “major exploration” arranged in an unified and planned way;

b. The metallogenic provinces having many granted exploration rights and the layouts being obviously unreasonable;

c. The investment in the metallogenic provinces not satisfying the requirements of the exploration plan and being “holding without exploration” area;

d. Not compliance with the mine areas plan or not suitable to independently grant mining right;

e. Necessary to be integrated.

Some of the CBM fields invested by the foreign investors have the feature listed above, esp. the feature listed in above c. Those foreign investors have successfully obtained the exploration right license from the MLR. But the minimum follow-up fund is contributed for the exploration work in accordance with the requirement of the relevant laws, regulations and rules. The complex reasons for that include the lack of the commercial utilization environment in China, including but not limited to the lack of the infrastructure, unwillingness of the miner to extract CMM, no utilization product and less incentives from the government and the private investors. However, we also can find there exists some CBM investors to hold the exploration right for vend, which will bring more profit than the further exploration and mining. Facing the coming integration surf, those holders waiting for the transfer of the exploration right to the CBM zones in China may require taking actions as soon as possible, such as the risk analysis (esp. the local policies) and strategy adjustment in China.

The time frame for the integration set by the Notice 2009 is as the following:

-　By the end of March 2010, the integration plan must be drafted and approved by the Provincial, municipal and autonomous region’s government and registered with the MLR;