Coal gasification operation appears to be an essential element in the advanced energy systems, where the reaction between oxygen, steam and coal results in production of syngas (e.g., a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen) under elevated pressure and temperature conditions. An efficient design for gasification process is expected if proper oxygen/steam rations are selected such that a thermal balance is established between the exothermic and endothermic reactions, leading to yield maximization of desired products in most cases. In this article, a rigorous modeling approach using support vector machine (SVM) algorithm is developed to estimate optimum oxygen-steam ratios required to balance the released heat and heat requirement in coal gasification process. An acceptable match between modeling outputs and real data is noticed so that the average absolute error is lower than 1.0%. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.