Science Magazine on peak coal
Robert Frederick, Science Magazine podcast (transcript and voice)
[Starts on page 9 of the 18-page transcript]
Host – Robert Frederick
In related news, coal production may be nearing its peak. According to the World Coal Institute, coal is the largest source of energy for the world's electricity and, at current production levels, there are proven reserves to last 133 years. But as Science news writer Dick Kerr reports, new analysis suggests that coal production may peak as early as 2020, raising questions about when alternatives to coal might become available and about how bad greenhouse warming might get from burning the remaining coal. Here's Dick Kerr.
Interviewee – Richard Kerr
There’s a lot of new interest in trying to anticipate when the world might run short of coal. There’s been a lot of attention given to when the oil might run out, but now some researchers are applying the same kind of techniques to coal assessment. And, the new approach is a bit sobering. The early estimates coming out of this work suggest that the world might be running out sooner rather than later – sometime in this century rather than the next century or two. And that has experts on both sides of the question getting into the fray, let’s say.
Interviewer – Robert Frederick
How are these estimates being made? Is it by drilling holes in the ground, or some other approach?
Interviewee – Richard Kerr
Well, people have drilled the holes, and then the resource assessment people come in, and they look at, “Well, there’s the coal in those seams underground, but how much of it can we actually get out? How much is going to be practical? How much is going to be worth the cost of extracting it?” And those are the geologists, and they turn all that into an estimate of how much coal is still in the ground that people will eventually take out. The new approach doesn’t go to that data – it goes to production data: how much coal has been produced in North America or China or Great Britain in the last couple hundred years. And they take that data and do a pretty simple plotting of this historical production, and then they draw a line through it and come up with how much coal is ever going to be produced from a particular region.
(1X March 2009)
For the audio, see the middle of the March 13 podcast from Science.
Richard Kerr is a longtime science reporter. He has written previously on peak oil. -BA
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