68 comments on Coal reserves and resources - a gentle cough
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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.