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190 comments on Richard Heinberg: Coal in the United States

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kenny on May 29, 2008 - 10:17am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Sorry, I'm not much of a writer. Yes, that's what I meant. The stampede will happen, but coal is not an answer for peak oil mitigation, for one thing because the problem isn't peak oil but rather peak resources and population overshoot.

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Heading Out on May 29, 2008 - 12:25pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

You have to remember that different fuels fit into different segments of the energy use pie. The immediate problem that we usually discuss here is the coming gap between supply and demand at a reasonable price, of oil and natural gas. They are liquid fuels and most of their use is in transportation.

In contrast most coal is used to generate electricity and, as I point out as part of a comment below, the public is not amenable to significant increase in that price. Which is a problem since it is largely in displacing coal that solar and wind have the potential. None of the three has a realistic chance of providing significant volumes (by which I mean over a million barrels a day) of liquid fuel in the next 20 years.

In a way coal is, however, like oil, in the latter case you only produce as much as the refineries can handle, in the same way with coal, there is not much point in producing more coal than the power stations can handle, since you can't sell it.

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Sterling on May 30, 2008 - 11:53am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Which is a problem since it is largely in displacing coal that solar and wind have the potential.

If only that were true. Unfortunately, without electricity storage or a shift away from a power on demand system, solar and wind will not displace the baseload parts of the existing generation system (e.g. coal and nuclear), they will displace the part that supplies the variable demand that results from weather and time of day demand variations (e.g. gas and hydro). That is why solar and wind are currently limited to about 20% of the generation mix and why building new nuclear is so important.

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