A pyrolysis model which can describe the effects of pressure on the evolution of coal-nitrogen has been constructed based on the FLASHCHAIN((R)) model in order to relate the gas release mechanism under high pressure conditions to the polymer reactions in coal. Various kinds of nitrogen-containing gaseous species in the evolved volatiles and their secondary decomposition and coupling processes have been also clarified by considering the elementary reactions of pyrrole-type nitrogen as the primary type of bound nitrogen in the first evoluted heavy species (tar vapor). The results show that the recombination reactions of metaplast are activated in a coal by the increase in pressure, resulting in a lesser amount of tar vapor and more intermediate chars. Thus, the conversion ratio of coal-nitrogen to gaseous volatile-nitrogen increases with the increase of pressure and N-gas converted from the fuel-N is much larger than the tar-N, and becomes more significant in high pressure conditions. Due to the chemical kinetics of the gas phase reactions, a shift in the distributions of tar-N vapor and gas-N with the increase of pressure can be predicted, and larger amounts of H2CCHCN and bipyrrole gases are rapidly formed through three-body reactions, while HCN gas decreases greatly compared with the reaction at normal pressures. The changes of gas composition are in close agreement with the experimental results. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.