Expert: Coal Reserve Estimates Way Too High 19 comments
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By Michael Kanellos
Government agencies have estimated that there is about 850 billion to 998 billion tons of coal in the ground that can be economically recoverable.
Not so, says David Rutledge, the Kiyo and Eiko Tomiyasu Professor of Engineering at Caltech, who has done his own estimates and showed them off this week at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
Rutledge estimates that the Earth had only 662 billion tons of recoverable coal in the first place and around 59 percent of the total remains. Thus, the real estimate of existing reserves is closer to 400 billion tons. (The earth, he added, contained the equivalent of 1 trillion tons of oil before the industrial age began.) He came to the conclusion by analyzing production data, similar to how M. King Hubbert in 1956 predicted U.S. oil production would peak in 1970. It peaked in 1971.
That number, to some degree, is good news for the renewable power industry. Nearly 400 tons of coal would be enough to provide electricity for decades. It would also add huge amounts of pollution to the atmosphere. Still, it makes a peak for coal more tangible and realistic and thus can prompt policy makers and investors to take even more interest in things like solar thermal power or nuclear.
How come his estimates differ so much from the officially sanctioned ones from government? Secrecy and national pride play a huge part (see Plentiful Coal, Not Peak Oil Is Greatest Global Warming Threat and Global Warming Talks Pose Big Impact on Greentech). Russia analyzes its own coal estimates but the real number is treated as a state secret. Sometimes it slips.
China also has forwarded only two estimates of its reserves to the World Energy Council and the second, later estimate was higher than the first. (The original estimates of China's coal reserves were published by Germans and Europeans working there before the 1949 revolution.)
The U.S. has done a better job of estimating reserves, but slips too. Paul Averitt controlled the process for estimating U.S. reserves from the late 1940s through the early ‘70s. He retired in 1974.
"Present estimates of coal reserves are based upon methods that have not been reviewed or revised since their inception in 1974. Recent programs to assess reserves in limited areas using updated methods indicate that only a small fraction of previously estimated reserves are actually minable reserves," reads a 2007 National Academy of Sciences report.
Interestingly, Wolfgang Zittel and Joerg Schindler of Energy Watch Group have noted that various countries have been lowering their coal estimates in recent years.
Technology has also cut down the ability to get coal out of the ground. Decades ago, miners dug it out of seams. They could get into smaller cracks than machinery can. It's one of the rare examples of technology doing a less thorough job.
Coal, like oil, peaks in production. In Britain, coal production peaked in 1913.
A big problem with containing coal consumption could arrive in the anticipated peak in global oil production, which many believe will occur in a decade or so. If oil peaks before electric cars or biofuels are ready, energy companies might turn toward coal-to-liquids technologies to keep cars and trucks on the road. That would increase emissions because coal-to-liquid fuel is dirtier and some energy gets lots in the conversion, according to Ken Caldeira, from the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University.
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This article has 19 comments:
in the late 1940's, the coal business was told by the u.s government to go out of business, all electric generation would be nuclear. admiral lewis strauss said that nuclear electricity would be too cheap to meter, we would just give it away. exploration for new resources stopped as a result.
production in iowa peaked in 1916 & went down ever since, at 8.5% sulfur it's hard to find markets for it. there's still a lot left.
much coal remains in the ground. in places like antarctica, extraction cost will be troublesome.
> jack
published reserves have always been a game of lairs poker - and i personally know places where reserves were understated for strategic reasons. so in reality we will never know the truth about reserves.
my point is that there is no verifiable baseline to mathematically derive coal reserves.
> jack
We are a nation of media whores. We accept whatever they send are way.
Modern pilot plants by compamies such as Rentech have produced very clean fuel.
We need to move to cleaner, hopefully renewable, or relatively limitless alternate energies; hopefully accomplished via technologies that lead to other economic and socially beneficial breakthroughs - BUT - even more important to our way of life; is that we need to gain energy independence without transferring all of our wealth to non-American hands.
It appears that our environmentalists and politicians give this little thought - or - are so globalized that America does not come first.
It is also likely that the great Global Warming hysteria will prove to be a terrible, incorrect, saga - that will soak up trillions of our national treasury only to turn out to be foolish mis-information and economically destructive.
SO - what to do. Invest a lot of our treasure, immediately, in gaining energy independence (coal to liquid & natural gas) as fast as possible. Set the cost of barrels of related liquid fuels at $60-70 no matter what their market cost is. Levee & take the $17-27 per barrel cost surplus and put it into a fund that can only be used to subsidize research & production of new forms of environmentally superior energy. Over the next decade that should be trillions going into new forms of technology/energy.
WHY? It will be our resources: coal, gas, manufacturing and human. It will be our economy growing. Our infrastructure and employment growing and stabilizing. Our trade deficit moving to a surplus. While we are securing our finances and economic strength, our global competitive power will grow. We will be global leaders in environmental change without going bankrupt. Our quality of life will cease it's decline and reverse.
Why have we not done this? Mis-information, Insider vested interests, environmentalists who push their ideas without economic accountability, a government controlled by global/special interests - who knows? But if we had taken the time to understand that FIRST we must secure our economic freedom, SECOND we must secure our environmental future and THIRD that no other people or government or global interest will put us first - THEN - maybe we could have and still can, get things in the right order and continue as the beacon of freedom and economic strength we have been and still are capable of.
Not a believer yet? Check out this Clean Coal Process! www.faqs.org/patents/a...
PNM foils 5, 6, and 7 gives estimates of HEAT RATE.
home.comcast.net/~bpayne37/pnmelectric...
Given that 1 Kwhr = 3412.14163 BTU then the loss may be greater than 50%?
Energy is not an area of expertise or ability, only an area of interest.
www.prosefights.org/co...
www.helenair.com/artic...
reality?
www.eurotrib.com/story...
Again, energy is not an area of ability or expertise. Only an area of interest.
"Since 1970 lower quality subbituminous and low qualitiy lignite have been contributing with rising volumes. The growing share of lower quality coal is the reason why *total coal production in terms of energy content peaked in 1998* at 598.4 Mtoe and has since declined to 576.2 Mtoe in 2005 in spite of the continuous rise in produced volumes (BP 2006)."
Right or not?
I'm exactly 45 days younger than Saddam Hussein.
Here is a good one.
"Greg Schaefer, spokesman for Arch Coal Inc., which operates two mines in the Powder River Basin, said the coal in the basin is shaped like a bathtub, with the edges near the land surface and then dropping deep underground in the middle.
‘‘That coal can be several thousand feet deep in the middle,’’ Schaefer said. ‘‘There’s no technology for that kind of operation.’’
Most of the mines in the basin are open pits where huge shovels remove the dirt and rock to expose the coal underneath. Most coal being mined is about 200 feet below the surface."
www.helenair.com/artic...
> jack
www.steelguru.com/news...
Mr John Heugh MD of Central Petroleum said that “The findings are a solid outcome and whilst there has not yet been sufficient drilling to arrive at a JORC resource estimate, the report has defined a coal Exploration Target potential of between 0.6 trillion tonnes to 1.3 trillion tonnes above 1,000 meters with a total tonnage inclusive of deeper coal sections of between 1.5 trillion tonnes to 2.1 trillion tonnes in CTP's combination of Mining and Petroleum Act permits and applications that covers most of the same ground.”
steelguru.com/news/ind...
Inner Mongolian proved coal reserve reach 701.6 billion tonnes
According to the information released by the Department of Land and Resources of Inner Mongolia so far the amount of coal reserve in Inner Mongolia has reached 701.6 billion tonnes ranking first in the country.