Abstract: Aiming at the shortages of methods in identifying tendency of spontaneous combustion in China at the present stage, the possibility of identifying tendency of spontaneous combustion of coal by activation energy was verified. The coal samples were analyzed by thermogravimetric method, the advantages and disadvantages of single-heating rate method and multi-heating rate method were discussed, and thermal kinetic parameters of three different heating rates of 5 ℃/min, 10 ℃/min, 20 ℃/min by Starink in multiple scan rate method with high accuracy was calculated. The research indicates that the activation energy is not constant which increases first and then decreases because the oxidation burning is a complicated multistep reaction. Finally, through the analysis of ignition of the same coal sample under different heating rates, we found that while temperature of three ignitions is different, but their corresponding conversion rates are close to a certain value. So we can choose the activation energy under fixed value conversion rate that is the ignition activation energy as the index for spontaneous combustion tendency of coal.