beegdawg007

Life After Coal: Coming Sooner than You Think

Tom exports of US App coal increased to over 80 M tons last year. That was a 40% increase. Europe has no choice but to purchase coal since that which remains in Europe is ultra dirty lignite. Europe now gets most of its coal either from Africa, Columbia or America. As a source of exported coal, the Appalachian mines have an obvious advantage over western mines because or their proximity to rivers and shipping ports. The price of App coal did go up in 2008 because demand did outstrip supply partially as a result of the large surge in export coal to Europe. That was surge in demand, coincided with restricted supply expansion because of the difficulty in obtaining new mining permits as a result of recently heightened environmental activism in Appalachia. However, that does not really support the argument that the US is going to run out of coal. Their are very large new and accessable coal reserves in the Ill basin, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana and Arizona. Just go to the DOE web site and look up the data on known "minable" reserves. In addition, this data actually discounts reserves which exist in wilderness areas that are currently designated as off limits for mining. It is believed that Utah may contain a trillion tons of coal which is in federal parks. Also, as you must know, the US possesses the equivalent of a trillion barrels of oil which is locked up in US oil shale deposits in the Northwest corner of Colorado. That would certainly provide a backup plan should we actually run low on coal. According to the DOE database, the US has 270 Billion tons of "minable - recoverable" coal reserves. Since we are currently mining a little over 1.1 Billion tons per year, that will last the US at least 200 years. Those who know anything at all about coal would not take serious any argument which postulates the likelihood that the U.S. coal supply could run out in 25 years. All of the DOE and USGS data available indicates that US coal reserves are enormous. Because it would be best for humanity to simply leave most of that coal in the ground, I genuinely hope that we will ultimately find a viable clean alternative to coal. But there is no current technology on the horizon which looks as though it could displace coal to any serious degree within the next 20 years.

Regards,

bd

On Feb 17 01:53 AM Tom Konrad wrote:

> Your argument does not seem to account for the increasing prices
> of all grades of coal. If the rise of PRB coal were solely due to
> its economic and environmental advantages, would not the prices of
> Appalachian and Central coal be falling?