Ventilation air methane in coal mining has an important environmental impact, since methane is a strong greenhouse gas (1 kg of methane is equivalent to 28 kg of carbon dioxide). The oxidation of methane in regenerative oxidizers can be an attractive technique to exploit this resource. Thus, part of the heat released by the reaction can potentially be recovered, in addition to decreasing methane environmental impact. However, the concentration of methane in the mine ventilation air may change considerably with respect to the oxidizer design value, which have negative consequences. An increase in concentration can produce overheating (with possible damage to the unit), while a decrease in concentration may cause the extinction of the reaction. In this work, three control systems have been considered in order to deal with these issues: proportional-integral-derivative (PID) and proportional-integral (PI) feedback controllers, and model predictive controller (MPC). The control action is based on regulating the heat extracted from the oxidizer by adjusting a hot gas purge from the centre of the reactor. First, the control systems have been designed (i.e. the tuning parameters of the controller have been calculated). To carry out the design of the controllers, a simplified dynamic model was obtained from a complex model of the oxidizer. Then, the performance of the controlled oxidizer has been simulated for different types of disturbances. In these simulations, the simple PID controller performed well, and the MPC exhibited the fastest response. (C) 2019 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.