Blog Roll: Peak Coal?
Posted by WSJ.com Staff
April 5, 2007, 5:49 pm
Peak oil is nothing new, but peak coal? “The general consensus view on coal supplies has long been that we have hundreds of years of the stuff left, and that oil and gas depletion are the pressing concerns,” writes Shaun Chamberlin, development director of the Lean Economy Connection, on The Oil Drum. “However, dissenting voices are emerging.” He goes on to quote Canadian geologist David Hughes, who recently claimed that “peak coal looks like it’s occurred in the Lower 48,” and summarize the findings in a recent report from the Energy Watch Group called “Coal: Resources and Future Production,” in which the consensus position on coal is also called into serious question.
PowerSwitch is hawking Crude Impact, a new DVD on peak oil. “This documentary film exposes our deeprooted dependency on the availability of fossil fuel energy and examines the future implications of peak oil — the point in time when the amount of petroleum world-wide begins a steady, inexorable decline,” the blog says.
Peak Coal Blog:
europe.theoildrum.com
COAL: RESOURCES AND FUTURE PRODUCTION
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
When discussing the future availability of fossil energy resources, the conventional wisdom has it that globally there is an abundance of coal which allows for an increasing coal consumption far into the future. This is either regarded as being a good thing enabling the eventual substitution of declining crude oil and natural gas supplies. Or it is seen as a horror scenario leading to catastrophic consequences for the world’s climate. But the discussion rarely focuses on the premise: how much coal is there really? This paper attempts to give a comprehensive view of global coal resources and past and
current coal production based on a critical analysis of available statistics. This analysis is then used to provide an outlook on the possible coal production in the coming decades. The result of the analysis is that there is probably much less coal left to be burnt than most people think.
energywatchgroup.org |
