The Oil Drum

memmel, It is interesting you should link the story below:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2524271,00.html
On the prior string, I did a prediction set of my own...
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2130#comment-143607
Take notice of point 5:
5. China slowdown: Surprising many, China will slowdown, and perhaps to such an extent that it creates an investor crisis. China has overgrown it's resource base, it's labor base, and it's customer base. It has become a speculative bubble, competing in some very low margin industries, and there has been a great deal of "paper inflation" there, in real estate and over capacity of production facilities, but many of those of inferior quality. Do NOT think that China is immune to the type of "Asian flu" that has in recent years swept through several Pacific rim countries. India and other Asian economies are providing stiff competition to the Chinese. They will have to learn to get lean, something they have not been to this point. The energy waste in China has historically been horrendous. This must change.

The Times article you quote is very indicative of what I was talking about....

On the subject of "peak coal" you ask is it possible? Of course, any mineral that is finite not only can peak, but in fact MUST peak, that is the philosophical, almost theological in some ways, underpinning of "peak oil", isn't it? Several long standing coal producing nations have already peaked in fact.

The question is, just as with oil, is it a geological peak, or a logistical peak? They are two completely different things! Coal is more subject to logistical peak, due to the labor and machinery required to extract it, and as you point out, the rail system required to move it. This requires huge amounts of steel, fabrication, etc., just to provide the digging equiment, engines to drive them, locomotives, engines to drive them, rail lines and yards, handling facilities to load and unload the coal...etc. In fact, this is the issue with American coal, in that due to environmental issues and low return on investment, most folks have not been eager to invest in coal handling infrastructure, and for example we have trouble exporting coal because the shore facilities would rather handle something this is easier to move and pays better. Coal requires very large and heavy scale investment in handling facilities to export, and also large barges that are not useful for much else, and that are wore to pieces relatively quickly. For MANY decades, there will be more coal than people who want to deal with it in the U.S.

China faces the same issue we did after WWII. Do you stay with coal, which requires heavy industrial development, lots of steel, and a large workforce which can go on strike, or do you go to something lighter, easier to handle, and with a far lower number of laborers to have to deal with, such as Diesel fuel or natural gas. For America, the choice was easy.....the coal miners struck just as oil and gas went into a prolonged price decline that lasted until the U.S. peak in 1971.

The Chinese are unfortunate in that easy and cheap oil and nat gas may not be so readily available. Coal, the heavy dirty slow way, may be the only choice they have. This will surely limit their ability to grow.

This makes for an interesting structural situation doesn't it? Renewables such as wind, solar and methane recapture may work better in China than in the U.S. simply because we already have a large coal/gas/oil infrastructure, comparative to the size of our economy. China's while large, is not nearly as large or able to grow as fast as the economy they intend to build. In other words, our renewable industry is competing against a massively entrenched and already discounted fossil handling industry, already expensed, while China will have to bear the massive capital expense either way they go.

Back to my prediction: China will slow down considerably, the question is, will it be a soft or a hard landing? Many Americans will get caught in the downdraft. Recently, one General Electric executive said he expected 60% of GE's growth in revenue to come from Chinese sales (!!) Millions of jobs worldwide rely on Chinese growth which is simply runaway and cannot be realistically sustained.

Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout

The coal that the U.S. imports is almost entirely metallurgical grade. It is used in direct heating/chemical reactions in production of higrade alloy steel. This replaces the Pennsylvania antracite that has been depleted, at least the easily mined material.

China is a bomb IMO. (Not the only bomb though.) The leaders are riding a horse they can't get off. Any slackening in the growth rate produces massive unemployment and upheaval. Yet the growth is totally unsustainable every which way. Unlike here, there are elderly Chinese (not even that elderly) who remember what it was like under Mao -- meager, simple, austere, but iron rice bowls, rudimentary universal health care, guaranteed minimal survival. Gone. Once the compensations of growth disappear, watch out.

These vulnerabilities are the reason the Chinese leaders put up with as much bullying from the US as they do, and continue holding a huge pile of rapidly depreciating dollars. Deadly embrace I call it.

Where else to go but coal after oil and gas become scarce? In more pessimistic moments (which stretch out into minutes, days, weeks sometimes) I think there's no hope that we'll avert worst-case scenarios of global warming and environmental devastation. Peak coal would be a blessing if it would but come on time. But it won't -- there's TOO MUCH of it. It seems that little stands in the way of our wrecking the planet.

The US is not currently a net importer.

As noted elsewhere, the coal currently imported is relatively small, and fills a particular niche. The imports are also related to particular transportation costs: it can be cheaper to import australian coal by boat at a particular port than to move it from Wyoming or West Virginia.

I recall in my Navy days seeing coal being loaded on a ship in Norfolk harbor. A local told me it was going to England. Quite literally a coals to Newcastle situation. This coal had certain properties that the British steelmakers wanted. Could it be that the coal being imported into the US has certain properties a specific customer wants?