68 comments on Coal reserves and resources - a gentle cough
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So basically future coal production is dependent on relaxing regulatory constraints and new technology to make extraction viable.
Isn't that the oil companies counter to Peak Oil?
Also, you like others talk about "price being high enough" when you obviously mean "profit being high enough". Profit = price - cost. You obliquely address this by saying new technology is needed to reduce costs.
Perhaps at the end of your teaser campaign you eventually will show how CO2 controls will be abandoned, and what the new technology actually is.
The problem with the "high demand = high price" scenario is the same problem with tar sands etc. As the price of energy increases, so do the costs of extraction - the receding horizon.
I'm still baffled why we have a pessimistic view of oil yet such a rosy view of coal. Coal is bad enough as it is, we really don't want any more of it.
Outside of the considerable environmental problems, coal will get a heck of a lot more economic as living standards slide. If you have serfs and slaves at a low standard, they may get by on just bread and tortilias. Sure, they'll die at 50 from black lung, but the upper 1% of the population will continue their lifestyles, which the Bush/Cheney crowd reminds us are not negotiable.
As I commented in an earlier post, the Scientific dept of the UK National Coal Board under Dr "Fritz" Scumacher , of the book "Small is Beautiful", was arguing in the early 1960s that the era of plentiful, cheap oil would be very short - about 40 more years. Since, in his view, there were only two primary products - energy and food, it was strategically most important for the UK to conserve its only secure energy supply - coal. Now that we are more aware of Global Warming it is clear that we must find ways of burning coal without huge Carbon dioxide emmissions. Such methods exist including underground gasification.
If we are talking rationally, I see no reason for not accepting peak oil as a geological fact for the current years. But "peak coal" is not a "geological fact". There are lots of coal reserves: the question is whether it is "economic" to mine them. The answer is surely that when oil becomes very,very expensive then coal becomes "economic" again. This is logical. Even with wholly mechanised longwall mining, electricity cost is a very small part of the coal mining cost structure. There is no net energy return issue.
In the UK the issue is highly political because the Tweedledoms and Tweedledees of UK political parties do not want to admit that the National Coal Board and the National Union of Mineworkers were correct.
RedBaron,
Would you say that by closing all the mines and thus leaving the coal in the ground for future generations (post cheap oil) Margaret Thatcher was securing the UKs coal resources?
This was perhaps not the route that the NCB and NUM would have taken...
Nick.
Its hard to tell if this was the intent but it seems this may have been the outcome.
On the contrary. When you close a colliery, the underground roadways collapse. There is no longer a route between the shaft and the workable seams. This coal is probably sterilised forever. Thatcher's energy policy, like her economic policy, was vandalism based on the belief that wet pavements cause rain.
Red Baron:
The stability of the mine after it is abandoned is controlled by a lot of different factors - including whether or not the mine then floods. There have been mines that have been re-entered years later that are still stable. Caves are an illustration that openings can stay stable without human intervention. In large measure it depends on how large the pillars are when the mine is abandoned. In areas that have been longwalled the roof has collapsed already, and those areas cannot realistically normally be revisited (though they can if you are doing multi-pass extraction and had filled the empty space with waste - though this is quite rare). It also depends on the ways in which they held up the rock over the roadways,
UK colliers were entirely longwall and roadways were supported by steel arches. The earth moves and if buckled arches are not replaced the roadway roof falls preventing access to the coal reserves. Now one one need to sink a new shaft , say 3 years, and you cannot speed this up with a Chinese army approach because there is only a few square meters to work in. Then lower roadway supports and blast out roadways underground. Everything is sequential and takes about 9-10 years if you have a skilled workforce -which the UK has lost. So now the UK faces "peak oil" with no secure alternatives. Short the Pound sterling too.
Bob:
Firstly my apologies for not replying earlier, I really wasn't reading Harry Potter, but involved in a project that took my day.
I believe, if you go back over what I have written in the past you will find that I have spoken out several times about the need to have and enforce strong regulation of the coal industry. What I was trying to point out was that the apparent assumptions that we are running out of actual coal in the ground are using a definition of reserve that is transient and does not reflect the amount of coal that remains, and further that, as other fuels become more expensive to produce, so the definition of what is a coal reserve will likely expand again.
This will likely be more controlled by the economics of demand than new technology, but, and I used in-situ combustion only illustratively of this, new technologies or the improvement of old ones will also play a part in increasing what the reserves of the future are considered to be.
After reviewing recent information and other information over the past several years, I can't help but feeling that there is a major disappointment ahead for those who think that the future will involve dramatic increases in coal production. Production may be stable or rise gently, but perhaps that's about it. The United States, supposedly the "Saudi Arabia of Coal," is close to becoming a net importer of coal! One major obstacle to increasing production is laying enough rail to do so. Present coal-bearing railways are about maxed out. Efforts to put in modest new feeder lines -- in places like Wyoming -- have not been very successful. Proposals to put in a new coal line in a coastal region are laughed at. That could change, but that process of change and eventual construction could take a couple decades.
Also, unlike oil or gas, coal varies widely in quality. On a contained-energy basis, I believe it was noted that the US hit a peak of production in 1998, with lower quality cancelling out any production volume increases since then.
I've seen some estimates of eletricity "demand" that show a doubling by 2030. Makes sense if a lot of Indians and Chinese want to use electricity. This 100% expansion is expected to be provided primarily by coal and nuclear. If 50% of the expansion is provided by coal (reasonable), then world coal production would have to double. If the US is maxed out, and China will be maxed out by 2015 or so, where is this doubling going to come from?
Lastly, as the UK example shows, these coal resource estimates might turn out to be something like a fiction.
When I see maps such as the one above, and for renewable energy resources such as solar and wind, I am always struck by the east-west divide. Two regions, separated by a north-south strip a few hundred miles wide that is marginally habitable (and likely to be less so as GW decreases precipitation and the fossil aquifers are drained). I have to wonder how long it will be before the interests of the two regions diverge, perhaps sharply so.
Econ guy:
As I tried to show from the earlier surveys, there is actually some fairly reliable data on the size of the UK resource. The problem is confusing what is there (the resource) with what is economically and viably recoverable (the reserve). At present the economics are such that deep mined coal cannot compete with oil and gas as a fuel. As those fuels start down the back slope of the production curve coal is, in the short term, a likely replacement - because there already is an industry, it can be geared up, and for a number of uses equipment is already in place to use it. There are some technical and economic issues with using it in machines (such as cars) that use liquid fuels, but these routes (such as CTL) have been developed. Thus it is probable that more of the resource will again be considered as a reserve - which it is currently not. But it is the change in what is considered a reserve that has occured, not the overall size of the resource.