68 comments on Coal reserves and resources - a gentle cough
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
The contents below are paid advertisements. Their appearance does not imply an endorsement by The Oil Drum.
“The infrastructure of suburbia can be described as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.”
—JH Kunstler
Search The Oil Drum with Google
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Prof. Goose, Heading Out, Stuart Staniford, Nate Hagens
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Gail the Actuary, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Khebab, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Local: Glenn
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Technician: Super G
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Local
- Ask not what your next President can do, Ask what you can do for your tribe
- Summer Streets a Success!
- Plan for Hydro-Fracture Drilling for Unconventional Natural Gas in Upstate New York
TOD:Europe
- RAMseS: a new agricultural paradigm
- RAMseS: a new agricultural paradigm
- The First Wave Energy Farm of the World...It's About Time...
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
- Oil Megaproject Update (July 2008)
TOD:ANZ
Peak Oil Primers
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- Calculated Risk
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
Yes. Let us please haul up to the surface of the earth the remainder of the sequestered carbon stored since the Eocene. That is BRILLIANT!
As we all know Global Warming is a crock and therefore we can burn all the coal we want with impunity. Don't even mention the pollution or the destruction of entire ecosystems. That is a bunch of liberal hooey anyway.
Just remember the engineer's motto: Don't matter if it kills us all. What matters is that we can do it!!!
Non sequitur - there is a vast difference between acknowledging that global coal reserves are very large and arguing that there should be no constraints on exploiting them.
Yeah, but if we keep it quiet, perhaps they won't notice it and won't dig it ;) lol
I know, Cherenkov, it's all madness isn't it?
So it Goes...
While we're talkin' Coal, I'll once again plug "Big Coal" - Jeff Goodell. Great read. My favorite fun fact: a power plant burns up a mile-long train of coal every twelve hours. Yeah, that's real sustainable!
Well, rabbits, I left my copy at the office and so can't immediately look up
those numbers, so I did a quick google, and found that a typical unit train contains 110 rail cars, and carries 11,000 tons of coal.
Again googling I found that the Longannet Power Station which is considered to be relatively large uses 10,000 tons a day to generate some 2,400 MW of power - so I suspect that the power station using more than twice this much must be one of the larger ones in the United States.
And I would suspect that many of the folk that enjoy the uses of that power aren't aware of where it comes from. But, nevertheless, would be loath to lose it.
As long as the consequences are somewhat remote, people will burn coal. If there is a choice between preventing freezing/ starvation today and higher sea levels tomorrow, people will choose the approach that solves the current problem. They will rationalize that everyone else is doing it, and in fact, everyone else will be doing it. Not good!
Spot on. And that's why it is so important to know with some certainty what coal reserves actually are.
Right now I'd bet on several new deep coal mines being opened in the UK before we hear news of direct solar power plant being built in Algeria.
Coal mines in England provide feed stock for existing generating infrastructure, provide jobs for immigrant east european miners who will pay tax to pay the pensions of our ageing population and the source of the energy lies within our borders.
If only it would stop raining!
I once did some calculations on Coal and global warming for RealClimate, which I'd kept them..
The first assumption was that all Oil and Gas were extracted and burnt, and that 50% of the CO2 remained in the atmosphere.
This gives a surprisingly small final CO2 content (circa 450ppm IIRC). Which is around the somewhat vague limit for acceptable climate change.
From then on it depends entirely on estimates of remaining Coal. The lowest estimates (i.e. peak coal 2020 or so!) give a final CO2 concentration of circa 550-600ppm.
The highest estimates give a concentration circa 2000ppm. Goodbye entire Antartic Ice sheet. 70-100m sea level rise. Not good.
Yet this post indicates that I could well have been wrong about maximum resource sizes. So that figure could end up higher...