How Much Coal Remains?
Richard A. Kerr, Science via Environmental News Network (ENN_
The planet's vast store of coal could fuel the world economy for centuries--and fiercely stoke global warming--but a few analysts are raising the prospect of an imminent shortfall
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To a geologist, gauging how much coal the world has left to burn is a fairly straightforward, if daunting, business. Millions upon millions of drill holes have revealed where the coal is. So geologists can just evaluate each seam's quality and the cost of extraction. Add up all the coal worth mining and you've got lots and lots--within the United States, a century or even two of U.S. consumption; globally, 150 years' worth for the world.
But there's another, emerging approach to assessing coal resources that yields more sobering results. Rather than go into the field, these analysts go to the record books to see how fast miners have been producing coal of late. By fitting curves to that production history, they come up with a number for the total amount of coal that will ever be mined and a date for the greatest production, the time of "peak coal," after which production inevitably declines.
Early results from this curve-fitting analysis of production history show much less coal being mined than geologists ever expected and a peak in coal production looming as early as a decade from now. Curve fitting "is a worthy competitor to a geological estimate" of remaining coal, says David Rutledge of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, a nongeologist who has produced such an estimate himself. Geologists beg to differ. "The whole notion of applying statistics to time series [of coal production] is fraught with danger," says energy resource geologist Peter McCabe of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in North Ryde, Australia. "I think what you see in Rutledge's presentation is a fundamental misunderstanding."
(13 March 2009)
Also at Organic Consumers. The original article (behind a firewall) is at Science. The March 13 podcast from Science covers peak coal at the end:
For some reason, ENN and Organic Consumers have the headline "Is Peak Oil Almost Here?" when in fact the subject is peak coal. -BA
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