"The reason that coal is not shipped by pipeline is more political than technical"

Can you expand on this? My guess is that such shipments will require enormous amounts of water. And at 1bln.tonnes annually even dry coal has similar volume than all oil ever piped in this country. Not sure it would be economical to build another pipeline system just for that.

Of course a large scale coal expansion may change this, but I'm not familiar with the technical details to have an opinion.

Think you are overestimating the profit coal miners are making - as the article says the whole industry is worth 25bln. And if coal prices double or triple, let's say stay sustainably over $100-$200/ton, then other alternatives like nuclear or solar thermal will be the preferred choice, not coal. Basically coal will follow the fate of oil - oil will also never run out but it will just become too expensive to be practical.

it doesn't make sense if the profit isn't there.

Huh. So there has to be a PROFIT for something to make sense?

Plenty of things humans do without a profit motive.

turn the old mine into an ATV area or a garbage dump.

So lets see - we are to believe your position in things. Yet here you suggest that ATVs will exist as 'needing an area' in the future? Where exactly will these ATVs get power - perhaps "we" don't need coal if there is so much cheap energy that ATVs can have a 'area'?

As for using a mine as a dump - yet another poorly thought out "idea".

I'll leave it to the other readers to reflect on your 'ideas' and their value.

There is plenty of energy out there, it is just that we haven't bothered developing it, as fossil fuels were so cheap.

This is of course true. The sun has plenty, the galaxy more, and the universe oodles. But the issue is: how much is available to us? Oil is the perfect fuel. It's compact and safely portable. NG has some other virtues. But from there it is a downhill slide.

Nature collected and stored and packaged hydrocarbons for us (well, if not for us, then who?) and we took it, and took it, ... . One might say the same for uranium, dense yes, but hardly portable and requiring a huge and advanced infrastructure, plus safety issues and costs before, during and after. Solar also requires an infrastructure, manufacture is not a small deal, and the end product is not ideally packaged for transport (therefore requiring conversion) -- and this is the key to our way of life, the global economy.

The key is that we vastly under-estimate, IMO, the very great virtues of oil and NG, relative to all other possible sources of energy. The other sources exist, but can they provide energy, after conversion, and after all the required resource inputs are costed (including the environmental ones -- which is all we have to fall back on the techno fixes fail) that will sustain anything near our present way of life?

I'm not capable of doing the required research. But just on the surface of it, it looks very problematic too me. The surface being exquisite quality of the oil resource for the modern economy. It's as if nature led us down the garden path -- here it is, take it, enjoy it -- ha, ha, you've used half of it up - now your on your own! Good luck.

But we do have brains. Science is just the collective human brain. Now we've got to use the collective brain to see where we are and what can be done.

Well, of course it is ultimately true that none of us really knows the future, and just about everything that is posted here merely represents each person's best (and sometimes educated) guess. To that extent, I don't believe I'm out of line in contributing my own thoughts.

One thing I can predict with absolute certainty, though: eventually, the non-renewable resources WILL be depleted, and once we are at that point we will have no choice but to rely exclusively on renewable resources. Argue that point if you want, but I suspect you will be shouted down pretty quickly by heavier hitters than myself.

I start from that basic premise and work backwards. As to why I think that the US per capita GDP would have to be 75% lower in a sustainable, steady-state economy (which is the only type you can have with renewable-only resources), see the article by Francois Cellier posted last year: Ecological Footprint, Energy Consumption, and the Looming Collapse, particluarly my exchange with Dr. Cellier. Sustainability implies an ecological footprint of 1.8 ha/4.4ac per capita. All of the countries with relatively high human development index scores that manage to come anywhere close to this have per capita GDPs that are around 25% of the USA. This is not a hard figure, of course, and I suppose that one could spin out any number of scenarios that could result in both higher or lower figures. However, it seems to me as good as anything for thinking in terms of a likely end point in the transition from an economy based on non-renewables to one based solely on renewables.

It is important for people to understand that to my way of thinking, the above represents a best case scenario. I fully accept that things could end up much worse. The thing that separates me from doomers is that I believe that at least this best case scenario is still possible, that a catastrophic collapse and die off are not an absolute certainty.

An economy with a per capita GDP of around 25% of present suggests that we've only got one way to go: down. The big question of course, is how long we've got, and how steep the descent has to be. I'm hopeful that we'll have the better part of the century to make the transition; my fear is that it is all going to happen faster than that. My best guess is that we are at least going to be well on our way on the long-term descent path within the next decade or so, and will be remaining on it for the remainder of the lifetimes of just about everyone reading this, and probably long after that. No calculations, although Heinberg's calculations in this article suggest that the coal should hold out for most of this century, even allowing for massive switching from other FFs; thus, a slower descent on a shallower slope does seem to be the more likely outcome.

Yes, a breakthrough that makes a rooftop full of PV panels possible for $1,000 would certainly be helpful. But I doubt that it would very much change the fundamental assumptions driving my model (if one can call it that).