Abstract: Exploiting wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for mine safety monitoring is a research hot area of wireless networks. Energy saving optimization becomes one of the major concerns in the WSNs routing protocol design, due to the fact that the sensor nodes are equipped with limited battery power. In order to prolong the network lifetime and guarantee the real time of data transmission, a new energy aware opportunistic routing is proposed. It exploits a new routing metric, which jointly considers link quality, energy and transmission delay. Also, a forwarding candidate selection method is proposed and the cooperation between the nodes which are in candidate set is presented. The simulation results evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme for mine environment-energy/expected transmission count (ETX) aware opportunistic routing (METOR). It is shown that the proposed OR can obtain much better results, comparing with the traditional opportunistic routing.