<Open thread The Oil Drum A Touch of Stagflation?>

20 comments on Brian Schweitzer replies

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p on October 7, 2005 - 3:40am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
Somewhere I dug up numbers that seem to state that all current daily coal production would be the equivalent 10 million barrels of crude oil. I'm afraid I can not find that link anymore though...

Since we have "250 years worth" of coal (Whatever that figure means..), and we need 85 million barrels of crude we need to scale up coal production about 9 1/2 times. Now if we were to use *only* coal that would mean we'd have 25 years worth of coal. Obviously there is still oil available after peakoil, so this is not a realistic scenario, but it gives you an idea.

But there is another thing: After natural gas peaks, locally or globally, coal production needs to be ramped up as well for the production of electricity.

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wkwillis on October 7, 2005 - 5:15am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Well, that bit about all of our coal production is only worth 10 million barrels a day of crude would be true if we were still distilling coal oil out of coal in coke ovens circa 1850...
But no, the coal production only has to go up about half to completely zero out imports of oil and also replace depletion in the US.
About five years of work and we will have rebuilt our industrial base from steel to oil and everything else in between. Five years of making do with old computers and television sets and wearing clothes till they wear out. Five years of living a McDonald's workers existence for middle class people while the McDonald's workers get middle class jobs working in strip mines and steel mills and other good jobs at good wages.
Just think of it as a trip back to 1973 for the lower class, and the middle class, and the rich.
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Waldi on October 7, 2005 - 10:36am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
A quick back off the envelope calculation suggests that the current US coal production (responsible for roughly 20% of the US energy consumption vs. approx. 40% for oil) is indeed equivalent to about half of the oil consumption in the US.  Thus 10 million barrel/day sounds quite right to me. The actual number would be probably lower due to conversion losses. Does anybody has the EROEI numbers for Fischer-Tropsch?
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wkwillis on October 7, 2005 - 5:48pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Waldi's right, I'm wrong. I was remembering the graph for electric power sources where coal was as important as everything else put together, not the graph for coal as an energy source.
We would have to mine twice as much coal to replace oil imports. Also, since coal is CH and oil is CH2 you get a lot of byproduct CO from the H2 production, so you burn that in gas turbines (after you clean it, just like you clean H2S out of gas) and that is what we will use to replace gas production as it declines.
I should have remembered that.
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Boof on October 9, 2005 - 12:32am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Waldi
I don't know the EROI but I can guesstimate a greenhouse intensity figure.  Choren Industries say their SunFuel is 10%  as greenhouse intensive as petroleum diesel.  Princeton University give a range of figures for FT diesel from coal with the middle value about 150% of petrodiesel. If my arithmetic is correct that means FT diesel from coal is about 15 times more net GHG intensive than from biomass, assuming no CO2 capture.  I think a carbon tax would be good insurance to  ensure coal-to-liquids producers stayed 'clean'.
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Gloomy on October 7, 2005 - 11:30am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
5 years? Isn't that quite optimistic? China started building a single 50000 bpd coal liquification factory (which is an enormous project itself) in 2003 and expect it to be operational in 2007 or 2008. So for a single factory they need 5 years, given that they didn't need to expand their coal production to feed it.
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20 comments on Brian Schweitzer replies

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