Is there really 200 years worth of coal left?

Just about everyone assumes that there's at least 200 years worth of coal left in the ground. This makes fears about greenhouse-gas emissions that cause global warming all the more acute, coal being the most carbon-intensive of the fossil-fuels. But what if popular estimates of coal reserves are no more accurate that what the oil companies are telling us about oil? What if, in other words, peak coal is as real a possibility as peak oil?

Well, some analysts say that just may be the case. A couple of months ago New Scientist ran a feature under the head of "Coal: Bleak outlook for the black stuff." Here are some excerpts:

A number of recent reports suggest coal reserves may be hugely inflated, a possibility that has profound implications for both global energy supply and climate change.

The latest "official" statistics from the World Energy Council, published in 2007, put global coal reserves at a staggering 847 billion tonnes. Since world coal production that year was just under 6 billion tonnes, the reserves appear at first glance to be ample to sustain output for at least a century - well beyond even the most distant planning horizon.

Mine below the surface, however, and the numbers are not so reassuring.

...

Is it possible that the sturdy pit prop of unlimited coal is actually a flimsy stick?

That is certainly the conclusion of Energy Watch, a group of scientists led by the German renewable energy consultancy Ludwig Bölkow Systemtechnik (LBST). In a 2007 report, the group argues that official coal reserves are likely to be biased on the high side. "As scientists, we were surprised to find that so-called proven reserves were anything but proven," says lead author Werner Zittel. "It is a clear sign that something is seriously wrong."

Since it is widely accepted that major new discoveries of coal are unlikely, Energy Watch forecasts that global coal output will peak as early as 2025 and then fall into terminal decline. That's a lot earlier than is generally assumed by policy-makers, who look to the much higher forecasts of the International Energy Agency. "The perception that coal is the fossil resource of last resort -that you can come back to when you run into problems with all the others - is probably an illusion," says Jörg Schindler of LBST.

In fact, so close may we be to running out of cheap coal that it may help us avoid catastrophic climate change. At least, that's the theory:

The silver lining to this gloomy scenario is coal's effect on climate. Forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assume more or less infinite replenishment of coal reserves, in line with traditional economic theory. Less coal means less carbon dioxide, so the impact on emissions could be enormous. Using one of the IPCC's simpler climate models, [David] Rutledge [chair of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology] forecasts that total CO2 emissions from fossil fuel will be lower than any of the IPCC scenarios. He found that atmospheric concentration of CO2 will peak in 2070 at 460 parts per million, fractionally above what many scientists believe is the threshold for runaway climate change. "In some sense, this is good news," Rutledge, says. "Production limits mean we are likely to hit the general target without any policy intervention."

That may be a bit too optimistic. Even if this rather extreme scenario is trye, there are plenty of climatologists who say 470 ppm is way too high and that we should be thinking more along the lines of 350 to avoid exceeding tipping points.

It's looking like not just China's appetite for coal is growing --- even Europe wants to burn more it, according to today's NYT/ So just how much of the stuff is left may be irrelevant. We now have sufficient reason to push for James Hansen's proposed moratorium and two-decade phase-out of coal.

While there is good reason to doubt that existing coal reserves are as big as Big Coal would have us believe, counting on dwindling coal supplies to prompt a new embrace of clean alternatives seems to me even more naive.

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How many years until we hit peak solar?

By Jim Thomerson (not verified) on 23 Apr 2008 #permalink

Any nonrenewable resource - oil, gas, coal, uranium - must inevitably have a peak production point. That is not a matter of question; it is a mathematical certainty. You have zero production at some point in the past, and you will have zero production from some point in the future. In between, production will be positive, and one point will of course have the highest production rate in the entire interval. A peak is completely inevitable.

The insight that Hubbert added was that for oil production and other large-scale systems there are many, many factors that affect it, and that will create a skewed Gaussian distribution of production, with one, distinct production peak (rather than, say, multiple roughly equal peaks over most of the production period). The larger-scale the system the more factors there are, and the better the overall fit.

Solar does of course have a peak of sorts (for different reasons than oil, coal or whatever) - the point in time when the sun is outputting the most energy, sometime between lighting up some billion years ago, and cooling to a cinder in the very far future. For us, of course, that peak moment is of no practical interest as far as our energy needs are concerned.

It's not only the use of coal that is harming the environment; the extraction of it is becoming more devastating. The Appalachians are getting screwed by mountaintop removal, which will have long-term effects that may be worse than the short-term nightmares.

But coal production may end before the coal supply does. As the underground supply goes wanes, we use ever more drastic tactics to get to it. And this will continue as long as the demand for coal keeps the price high enough to make extreme extraction profitable. At some point, it will no longer be worth it to destroy communities and risk lives to get the last bit of coal out, but only if the dollars aren't there anymore.

This is odd, taken literally at least: '[...] fractionally above what many scientists believe is the threshold for runaway climate change. "In some sense, this is good news," Rutledge, says. "Production limits mean we are likely to hit the general target without any policy intervention."'

By Steve Bloom (not verified) on 24 Apr 2008 #permalink

How many years until we hit peak solar?

~5 billion for "peak" solar as in when it fries the earth, but I haven't read about it for a long time.

By Chris O'Neill (not verified) on 24 Apr 2008 #permalink

Maybe it'll be enough. There are a number of emergent technologies that are not very well known even among the educated classes. Over at Daily Kos there is a series of explorations on new fusion technologies that are very interesting and hold great promise. Worth looking into at any rate before we paralyze ourselves with fear.

I saw this blog featured in the header and came over here specifically to see if the ideas I first got from Al Bartlett about 30 years ago were in the discussion. I was not surprised to see that they were not.

His essential point is that you cannot argue that there are 847/6 = 141 years of coal left unless you are clearly in a zero-growth situation. If coal consumption is increasing (as it has been) at even a modest rate, the remaining time is much, much shorter. The integral of an exponential function is a lot bigger, a LOT bigger, than the integral of a constant function. The reason Hubbert gets such a nice peak is due to the way exponential growth hits up against a finite resource with increasing extraction costs.

I'll leave as a homework problem the calculation of how long 847 Gt will last if the consumption rate of 6 Gt/yr increases at 5% per year.

and here is Al's very enjoyable lecture on video ...

http://globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/461

This interview with Lester Brown cheered me up a bit.

http://vimeo.com/869141

It does seem like the world can go sustainable in a reasonably rapid time. However, the nagging question is have we gone too far already

its a close call nowand its going to be a wild ride!

I'll leave as a homework problem the calculation of how long 847 Gt will last if the consumption rate of 6 Gt/yr increases at 5% per year.

Approx 45.2 years. Do I get a smiley sticker?

By Bartlettman (not verified) on 26 Apr 2008 #permalink

Damn, make that a frowny. Correct answer is 42.8 years. I've really gotta learn to check my working before recklessly bellowing the answer at the internet.

By Bartlettman (not verified) on 26 Apr 2008 #permalink

Coal should be left to the paleontologists.

(Full disclosure: I am one.)

By David Marjanović (not verified) on 26 Apr 2008 #permalink

Close enough for government work.

And imagine burning 24 Gt/yr just 28 years from now.

By CCPhysicist (not verified) on 26 Apr 2008 #permalink

A better estimate of "peak solar" would not be based on the sun's lifetime, but on our consumption. That's, after all, the more important quantity when it comes to all fuel consumption - when supply dwindles below demand. I hope that the future includes crazy things like space elevators, flight suits, robots, and god knows what else. Our energy demands will surely escalate. If we rely on solar power, there is a finite limit to the amount of incident light striking the Earth every day, which is the fundamental limit of how much energy we can derive from the Sun (barring solar sails, etc.). Wikipedia pegs this number at 174 petawatts (that is, 10^15 watts). By comparison the World Bank says in a single year (1995) our global energy consumption was 316 quadrillion Btu, or 3.3e20 Joules. I.e., the Sun gives us as much energy as we consume in a year in about half an hour; alternatively our power consumption is 1/17500th of what the Sun can give us. Factoring in efficiency, land use, and increasing energy consumption, that doesn't put "peak solar" that far off.

....unless we make a dyson sphere

Even then, it wouldn't be "peak" solar, more "plateau solar". Peak indicates that you reach a maximum point, and then begin to decline. Even if our energy needs hit the maximum we could get from solar, it wouldn't cause any reduction in solar energy.

To add to CCPhysicist's comments:

1. If we attempt to replace oil with synthetic oil from coal, the likely rate of increase is a lot more than 5% per annum.

2. Feel free to conduct a similar exercise based on approximately 120 years of Uranium at current consumption rates.

That 120 years of uranium would be based on the amount of naturally-occurring U-235? Because a properly constructed breeder reactor can turn a sheath of "depleted" U-238 into usable fuel, if we were willing to take a chance on having an industrial reprocessing system (which is open to abuse for weapons purposes.) This could increase the available supply of fission fuel by a factor of ~200, which would certainly extend that 120 years by a bit (even if we went the way of France and replaced coal and oil with nuclear.)

By AstroPaul (not verified) on 27 Apr 2008 #permalink

It is my opinion that we simply must, as you said, "go the way of France". Also, in at least some facilities, reusing nuclear material will happen, and I fully support it. Nuclear can get us through the problem while not causing an incredible cost for energy. Also, I think? mining uranium is not so environmentally unfriendly. Assuming we can get some working hydrogen cars and start using public transportation, we may not need to go hide in underground shelters for a very, very long time while the radioactivity covering earth's crust(caused by wars for resources that degraded into MAD scenarios) decays.

Astropaul, the problem with that hytpothesis is that there is not a single working commercial breeder reactor anywhere in the world.

The prototypes that were built generally caught fire; exploded or melted - although there was one in Russia that caught fire, exploded AND melted.

In theory, breeder reactors can supply energy indefinitely. In practice, they are probably further from general use than virtually any other proposed energy source except fusion.

Breeder reactors are much harder to build and maintain than standard nuclear reactors. The core of a breeder reactor operates at a much higher temperature than standard reactors and to date all the breeder reactor designs use liquid sodium to cool the core because water or steam can't remove the heat quickly enough. Then they have a secondary system using steam which transfers heat from the sodium and uses it to run turbines.

There are a couple of problems with this - sodium explodes on contact with water and at the temperatures involved ignites spontaneously in the presence of oxygen.

Oh and let's not forget that you need to heat the sodium during any down-time to stop it solidifying in the pipes and trashing the entire reactor.

The French breeder reactor Superphenix used so much energy keeping the sodium molten when the reactor wasn't working that it was a net energy consumer.

We're probably at least 10 years away from having a viable reliable breeder prototype. Now factor in that it takes 10 years from the initial decision to build a reactor to final commissioning - and that's for the much less complex and safer reactors we use now.

Anyone think breeder reactors will contribute a significant percentage of the world's energy use in, say, the next thirty years?

By Ian Gould (not verified) on 27 Apr 2008 #permalink

"Also, I think? mining uranium is not so environmentally unfriendly."

Actually much current Uranium production comes from Africa and Russia. In both areas, environmental standards are way behind the west and at least in Africa there are probably thousands of deaths per year related to mining Uranium. Data is limited but there's definite evidence of extremely high cancer rates amongst African Uranium miners and workers in Uranium processing who typically work without respirators or protective gear.

As far as human safety goes, mines in Australia and other western countries are obviously much better.

But google the environmental effects of Olympic Dam some time.

Olympic is the world's largest Uranium mine - it's a huge open-cut mine which mines low-grade ore. In order to mine there, it was necessary to pump out the underlying aquifers over a large area of northern South Australia.

The water was too saline for most uses so it was allowed to evaporate producing large salt pans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Dam

By Ian Gould (not verified) on 27 Apr 2008 #permalink