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3000 billion tons of coal off Norway's coastline
Posted by Stuart Staniford on January 6, 2006 - 7:15pm
In case you missed this over at Energy Bulletin
This summer, students from Norwegian University of Science and Technology analyzed data from 600 wells drilled on the Norwegian Shelf of the North Sea. They calculated that there are 3000 billion tons of coal off the Norwegian coast. Most of the reserves are located at Haltenbanken. This compares to today's proven and recoverable world reserves of 900 billion tons of coal.If we suppose a CTL yield of about 3 barrels/ton (Miller, Coal Energy Systems, p274), the 3 trillion tons of coal under the North Sea corresponds to about 9gb of liquid fuels.
Update [2006-1-6 19:51:50 by Stuart Staniford]: Oops - I meant to say 9 trillion barrels of liquid fuels, not nine billion (ie around 4 times as much as linearization suggests is available in conventional liquid hydrocarbons globally).
Ok, that coal is a little hard to get at. Railway tunnels under the North Sea? Right now they're thinking smaller than that:
"By injecting oxygen, we can ignite the coal where it is. This will produce a mix of gas which we can recover and use for energy-production. The problem however, is that one of the components of this gas mix will be the greenhouse gas CO2. We have to research a lot before we can utilize the resource in a way that doesn't harm the environment."Still and all, it makes it clear that the 2050 problem is not having hydrocarbons to burn, it's what it's going to take to get them, what's going to happen to the economy in the meantime, and what it's going to do to the climate if we put that stuff out of our tailpipes.
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—Mark Twain
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==AC
Its the same thing as realising that there are vast ammounts of deep sea oil in the 1950:s when the technology needed for exploiting it is nearly science fiction.
It makes it very clear that peak oil will not solve the global warming problems and more likely make them even worse.
It gives another degree of freedom for technological development and investment in engineering work to solve our energy needs. We quickly need to discover ways that both are doable and good enough for our environment.
Cripes, this sounds to me like a terribly, terribly desperate way to harvest energy.
http://www.driveupusa.com/
from the website:
"Why aren't the ingredients of your products listed on the label?
A. Since all of our ingredients are non-toxic, it is not required. The revolutionary formulas for Drive Up and Revive A Drive are protected under the Trade Secrecy Act."
well, if it's all the same to you, i won't be splashing it anywhere near lifeforms.
Has this ever been tried on a pilot scale? How deep are these coal deposits? How do you go about doing gasification from an off-shore rig?
I'm sure that some of the anti-peak oil people will cite this finding as proof that we have nothing to worry about, so what I'd like to know is what is the state of the are regarding offshore coal gasification?
Anybody out there who can make me smart on this subject?
According to one of the scientists it will be quite a challenge to harvest this coal, if ever.
Yes, every oil drummer knows that 1 barrel has been, is and will hopefully remain 159 liters.
What will be the effects from € 1000 a barrel of oil, and how far into the future are we talking here?
"... taking a taxi today in Germany is more expensive than driving a Twingo after the big enchilada."
3 trillion tons of coal equals 9 billion barrels of oil equivalent. Did you misplace a few zeroes? Sounds more like 9 trillion barrels to me.
No doubt that the tunells would be running 10's or perhaps 100's of kilometers.
Then you have to circulate huge amounts of air, pumping out massive amounts of water as it should be expected a continuous flow from the ocean above.
How many tunells would be needed to move coal that could satisfy a CTL plant of say 10 mb/d?
Where should the solid residuals be deposited? Someone in a Norwegian blogg proposed that one of the largest valleys in Norway, Gudbrandsdalen, could be used to dispose of the solids.
On the other hand the potential of 9 Tb of liquid fuels in a future with expected huge liquid deficits and thus spiralling prices could make many, and not only investors interested.
It could be an interesting exercise to try to estimate the EROEI for such a project.
Thanks for bringing some common sense to this thread. Theoretically anything is possible, but many things are not commercially practical. This seems to be one of them. It takes someone with engineering expertise to point out what the critical hurdles would be. It is the same real world issue as getting oil out of tar sands, or methane from deep sea. People can imagine how to do it, and maybe even prove the concept but doing it as a business, with positive economic and energy return 24/7 is a stretch for me.
What puzzles me is why we spend so much energy and technology trying to making deep sea coal work. Why not spend the energy, human capital and time capturing sunlight, wind, waste energy, etc. Maximize energy efficiency, building design, transportation, etc. so they need less energy. All those areas are under funded, have great potential and are ultimately more sustainable.
To use nukes could probably result in fuels suitable for not still invented hybrid nuclear/coal power plants. :-)
Does anyone remember the fresh water solution proposed about 20 years ago for NYC? Something about towing an iceberg south...
"Many problems arise when digging so deep into the Earth. The most obvious is the heat. For example, at 5 km the temperature reaches 70 degrees Celsius(158 degrees Fahrenheit) and therefore massive cooling equipment is needed to allow workers to survive at such depths. Another problem is the weight of the rock. For example, at 3.5 km the pressure of rocks above you is 9,500 tones per meter squared, or about 920 times normal atmospheric pressure. When rock is removed through mining this pressure triples in the surrounding rock. This effect coupled with the cooling of the rock causes a phenomenon known as rock bursts, which accounts for many of the 250 deaths in South African mines every year."
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/YefimCavalier.shtml
"3580 meters = ~2.2 miles"
http://convert.french-property.co.uk/
I doubt we will see this project starting before 2030, if ever. But still nice to know there is something which we could draw on in the future. Maybe put it to more constructive use than we do now.
The reason for this is that while the substance we are addicted to is finite, there many different substitutes available, ever more highly priced and with ever worse side effects. If there were only oil, and all knew that when it is gone it is gone, it would be easier.
I am an expert in this area. It's why I keep my refrigerator empty at night, why there is no food in the pantry, why my wife doesn't bother even trying to hide food---she knows I will find it. We are doomed.
It almost sounds easier to go and fetch methane from Triton.
Never say never though. I fear that people will figure out a way to build offshore platforms to exploit this.
few months and was just
inspired to create an
account.
In addition to tunneling, or
trying to change the state
of the coal, there might be
another alternative.
Couldn't they consult with
the Duch on constructing a
circular dyke on the area
they want to mine?
I suppose the water might be
too deep but this seems like
it might be an atractive
idea. If they can adjust
the buoyancy of the dyke
they could potentially move
it around to new sites.
Crazy or so crazy it just
might work?
And you are correct: the water is too deep. Cofferdams are not feasible at the depths we're talking about here.
Hmmm. Maybe just do deep shaft underwater mining. I'm sure HO could design an underwater coal cutting machine, and he was talking the other day about seeing mining machines operated during a conference demo thousands of miles away so maybe it wouldn't require that many divers. And no risk of explosions! :-)
Can we please get a break from the damned engineers? Anymore fixes and we might as well just shoot ourselves.
C
A definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing while expecting diffefent results.
The "same thing" in the current situation is the technofix attempt to 'solve' the problem of peak oil. Why? --because it's coming from the same paradigm (of constant "progress" and "growth" and narrowly-focused techno fixes) that got us into this environmental/population/climatological/and cultural-insanity mess in the first place.
Just as abundant, cheap petroleum and natural gas had unintended consequences (urban sprawl, vast overpopulation, pollution beyond belief, and a voracious appetite for consuming every living and non-living resource in sight) so will there be unintended consequences from any massive undertaking to retrieve any other form of fossil fuel from such demanding environments as 2,000 feet below the North Sea floor.
In time, we will all get a break from this paradigm, even as many diehards go down in flames trying to perpetuate it.
Cameron
Maybe the solution to the world's problems is to shoot all engineers and doctors.
But then who will drive all the trains?
If you are in the middle of the North Sea, getting rid of the coal's interstitial water is not going to be a problem. If you are in the North Sea, getting wind or wave power is not going to be a problem. If the wind is blowing when people need power, there it is. If the people don't need power, then dewater some coal to get gas. And when the wind is not blowing and people need power, you have the gas!
Since Norwegians are smart and they aren't making plans to do this already, it must not work. Probably because you need lots of wells to dewater the coal and drilling wells in the North Sea will cost too much.
Pity.
Let's spare our kids the trouble and just nuke ourselves now. The cockroaches will be thankful to have us out of the way for good. Let's give another species radiation a chance for self-awareness.
kilometers of volume. Assuming a generous 10 m seam thickness this translates into a contiguous area of about 450x450 km.
Why would this coal deposit be so rich and unique compared to any of the other deposits on the planet? This figure smacks of the same sort of overly generous estimates as you have for tar sands. I doubt that this coal deposit is sitting in a nice consolidated volume that can be recovered as envisioned. A zero should be dropped from this figure. I don't believe that 600 wells are sufficient to characterize this deposit and seismic survey is needed.
Any attempt to develop such finds would likely cost trillions for a relatively meeger net-energy profit at an enormous environmental cost. But as the on-going mountain leveling in West Virginia proves, such things are done regardless.
WE CANNOT CONTINUE TO WRECK THE PLANET!!!!!
NO PLANET = NO ENGINEERS.
CAN IT BE MADE ANY MORE CLEAR THAN THAT?
DON'T BE SO RECKLESSLY STUPID!!!!!!!!
To me, finding SOME coal, SOME nuclear and some combination of alternates is a necessary evil to make sure the coming gap is not too wide - with too wide of a "Hirsh Gap", the planet is really in trouble (nuclear bombs, getting methane hydrates at all costs etc.) I dont view coal or anything else as a PERMANENT solution to replace oil - just enough to avert a total societal mess, when smart people can still read internet blogs and travel to make decisions.
The answers to Peak Oil lie partly with engineers (supply side) and partly with social scientists and the rank and file (demand side). Clearly, to just replace one fossil fuel with another that is deleterious to planetary health just adds a (very) short delay to the catastrophe.
In sum, I get the sense that some here are voicing that we not look at all for alternative energies and that the Peak Oil calamity is baked in the cake -I disagree -we need the best environmental EROI options we can find to address the supply problem and then focus on altering our perceptions of what it means to collectively 'be happy' on the demand side
And as far as engineers go - who do you think will be designing the public transportation, alternative energy system, better insulation, etc. that we will need? Lawyers? Musicians? Football players? The bind we are in is no more the fault of engineers than it is of any one group - it is our inability to overcome our genetic programming.
What do YOU do?
Then reverse it.
Mandate localization.
Mandate energy saving.
We do not need to find more energy to fuel a massively screwed up system -- that is insane. We need to use the already IMMENSE stream of energy we have in a more responsible manner. If we mandated car-pooling, just mandating that you must travel with another person or face a fee, then you cut your transportation fuel use in HALF!!!
Imagine that. Look ma! I'm an engineer!!
The solutions should trend toward the simple, with the first solutions being reduction. Just quit using so much.
The funny thing is, IT IS NOT REALLY THAT HARD.
What is hard is prying the reins of power out of the money grubbing elites' hands and convincing a few hundred million right wing media saturated consumer zombies that they have to make the change. And, God forgive me, I don't belief that waiting around for the people vote themselves off Consumer Island or the idiot hand of the market to sweep in the next big thing will be prudent.
The Manhattan project was not simply voted in. There was no free hand of the market. It was the government. The government has to think beyond the tip of its lobbyist-infested nose and work FOR the people instead for the rich.
Encouraging the creation of yet another dead end entropy machine or the continuation of the ongoing entropy machine is tantamount to suicide.
IT IS NOT THAT HARD.
Knock your socks off. Sounds like a great idea. And Engineers are preventing this how? Learn how the world works - it is not engineers who make these things you complain about happen, nor are engineers getting rich off of it. And while I admit we're a virile bunch, I don't think you can pin ALL of the population growth on us - we let the artists breed once in a while too.
Sounds to me like the social engineers need to get busy designing societies that work without so much energy - greed.
The reality is there is much work to do on both the supply and demand side, and engineers will have a role to play in both endeavors.
Engineers are not working towards integration with the environment. They look for technological fixes, thinking that that is just the way it is done. Unfortunately, as long as people are in the consumer zombie trance, they will clamor for the latest techno geegaw. So, no, the engineer is only fulfilling a ravenous desire for crap.
The one consistent social item of interest regarding engineers and their reactions to admonishment is their almost unanimous tendency to personalize the argument, to believe the argument has become about blame. "Not me, he did it," or worse, to feel that they personally are being attacked. No. This is not about you. It is about the DESTRUCTION OF THE PLANET FOR CHRIST'S SAKE.
So, when I say "engineers" are doing "X," that means that I am commenting on the prevailing social reality. The problem is not coming from the fringe, i.e. "us." The problem stems from the vast numbers of engineers who see all of life's little problems as just another tech problem awaiting a tech solution. Engineers must realize that they need to be phased out. First they must help with the deconstruction of the massive entropy machine. They must then help with the transition to earth-friendly living. Then they must reengineer themselves into earth stewards, people who know how the world works and how to best fit in with the microclimate where they live without creating a doomed entropy machine.
And you are right. We DO need to reengineer society and its expectations. The beautiful thing about a closed system like planet earth is that no matter what we do, the system will simply do what's next. Plug into the coal system and continue business as usual? Bye, bye Gulf Stream. The world swings towards a massive cooling and food production plummets. Mass starvation ensues. Problem solved. So I guess the engineers are inadvertently solving the problem, just not in a very elegant or efficient way.
The world is dying. Don't help it die.
Maybe our species will enter a hard time very soon, but the world will get back on it's feed after we're done with mess'n around.
And besides that; we humans are also an animal product of nature. So one could argue that our acts are natural and the result of these natural acts IS the world, so no dying here at all, just evolution.
Perhaps you dream of a simpler life where we all live in harmony with nature, consuming far less energy from local, sustainable, non-polluting sources. It's a nice dream - I share it and I'm probably closer to achieving it than most, but it won't fully happen in my lifetime or yours. And there is an evil behind that dream - we have 6.8B people, and that lifestyle cannot generate enough food to feed them all, so to get there one must first go through a die off. And I'm not willing to wish that on the world.
I greatly admire the finely designed tools of the past. Draw knives, planes, an axe, simple agricultural tools - these things were not created by elves, they were designed. Their apparent simplicity is deceiving. But were you going to light your cottage with an oil lamp? What were you going to do for heat? 175 years ago, the room I'm sitting in had a dirt floor, single glazed windows that didn't seal, it leaked air like a sieve and had an inefficient cook fireplace. The hills around here had little wood left anywhere. And the world's population then was what? The wood stove that's behind me now heats my whole house for hours on 5-6 logs. That's technology at work, and it didn't just happen, somebody worked their ass off designing it - and yet we cannot all heat with wood. If the idea of solar powered high efficiency lighting, higher performance insulations systems, passive solar houses, or wind & wave power is appealing, you'd better keep some of us stupid engineers around. And some other engineers are going to need to keep trying to find ways to get fossil fuels out of the ground, or a lot of people won't live to see the climate change you (and I) fear.
So face it - you are not going to wake up one day and be living in the Shire with Frodo and the gang thanks to the magic of PO. There are real problems to solve, and a world full of real people who stand to suffer real misery if we cannot, as a society, figure out a path through the looming energy depletion, economic, social/political, and environmental/climatologically crises. It will take all kinds, including engineers, and if you cannot figure that out, I see no further reason to discuss anything with you.
Even if we have to retrench economically, high tech will frequently be more efficient than low tech.
I have a mini-hobby of making oil lamps. You can make a very nice oil lamp out of an old floodlight bulb. Just break off the posts where the wires come through, fill it up with vegetable oil, stick in a twisted bit of paper towel, and light it.
Post-peak, I wouldn't want to use it. Burn food?!? No, a much better solution is to get a small solar cell, an LED, a small rechargeable battery or medium-large capacitor, a resistor, a switch, and some wires. It's a lot safer than an open flame, a lot more efficient, and will probably cost a lot less to operate.
"But we won't be able to build LED's post-peak!" Well, if you believe that, you might want to stock up on a few thousand LED's, which can currently be purchased for a few cents apiece.
The point is that products like metalized Mylar (for insulation), electronics, chemical monitoring kits, and so on will make life a lot better post-peak than it would otherwise have been. Life might even be better post-peak than it was pre-oil. A lot of high-tech products, including computers, will be worth using post-peak--even if energy is ten times as expensive.
And it's engineers that developed all those products.
Chris
The future we're moving into is going to take practical ideas of all kinds and that, at the core, is the job of engineers. In the energy transition people here are looking at, the more practical energy saving/efficent using ideas the more lives coming out the other side in sustainable fasion.
It's not helping the world die, it'll be fine, it's helping our own families live that will be the work of engineers..... and all.
You're a clown who can't tell the difference between an engineer and a dictator. And you're still one of the stupid people whose choices are paying engineers to do the things you say you don't want instead of the things you say you do want. Hypocrite.
I'm developing some low-cost energy-saving devices. Buying some will do more for the world than posting here.
Research has shown that, for men at least, happiness on the job = happiness in life. This is not as true for women, who tend to be more affected by their home lives - marriage and family. But for men, who were the only ones studied for a long time, if they're happy at work, they're happy, no matter how their marriage or home life is going. Conversely, if they're unhappy at work, they're unhappy, no matter how wonderful their family life is.
This being the case, there's been a lot of research on what makes people happy with their jobs. One of the major factors is how well you fit in with coworkers, and that usually means thinking the same way they do. That's why career counselors will give you personality testing, then see where you fall on the grid - because you're most likely to succeed and enjoy your work if you're working with people who think like you do.
(So why did I end up in engineering, even though I didn't "fit"? Because I don't fit anywhere. 200,000 occupations in the handbook, and none of them matched my personality, which is apparently a very unusual mix of artistic and technical.)
The people who pay for some of those things are stupid. That's you.
On closer look, this looks like a complete hoax!.. They claimed that 600 wells have been drilled on the sea. The coal is 300 meters under the water and then under another 2500 to 3000 meters of solid rock. So you would have to drill 600 holes each almost 3000 meter deep, in the open sea. And you do that just for a scientific exploration. No way that's possible. If they are talking about analysing data from existing oil production wells, then maybe the whole data analysis is just wrong and there is no coal at all. At least nothing comes out of the drilled wells. If any coal was drilled out of those 600 wells, we should have know it 10 years ago, not today. So it must be a hoax.
Quantoken
C + O2 => CO2 (+energy)This is another way of saying "for every ton of coal we shall be using two tons of oxygen".
If we knew the location of sufficient hydrocarbons to consume all the oxygen in the atmosphere, would we dig it up and burn it?
That combined with the daunting task of actually trying to physically remove coal from deep beneath the sea bed suggests to me that the only technique that has the slightest chance of being feasible is some form of in situ gasification or perhaps some other in situ method for extracting hydrocarbons.
I vaguely recall some work using supercritical carbon dioxide to extract various goodies either from coal, tar sands, or something else. As some of you may know, when carbon dioxide is pressurized past its critical point, it behaves like something between a liquid and a gas and also has rather powerful solvent properties. The depth would certainly be sufficient to maintain CO2 in its critical state, so I could evision a system whereby the CO2 was pumped down a ring of injection wells, have it migrate through the deposit to dissolve out HCs, and then be withdrawn from a ring of extraction wells. Just an idea, and perhaps a lot easier said than done, but I don't see a chance in hell of ever actually mining this stuff.
The problem is that if you remove the coal, there is nothing to hold up the rocks above. In a normal oil well, there is still a porous rock formation to hold things up. With coal, it is solid hydrocarbons.
Eventually you will have extracted enough that you will have sea floor subsidence. If you get enough, you could get seawater infiltration, and then the whole game is up.
We did get a Richter three earthquake from mining subsidence once, in Wyoming or Montana IIRC. Took a generation's worth of mining to build a big enough network of holes to rattle some dishes when it collapsed.
But then again in the real world we aren't going to be mining the coal anyway. There is plenty of on land coal to mine.
Those 600 wells seem to be existing oil production wells. It looks very odd to me. If you drill for oil. You reach the depth where the oil is, you would stop and not to waste by drilling deeper. So if the coal is further deeper. How do you know for sure, without drilling further deeper to retrieve the rock samples. If the coal is above the oil, then you would have collected plenty of coal samples before you reach the oil and we would have known the coal 10 years ago when the wells were first drilled.
And a rock formation where you find oil layer above coal layer, is VERY VERY odd, completely defying what we know today how oils and coals were formed, in terms of geology.
The whole thing is not very credible, especially when the data analysis is done by some college kids.
What's stopping this now? The coal and people are cheap compared to the equipment needed. If the coal became valuable enough, if there is enough energy to build the machinery, and if people were considered more valuable than the machinery or not capable of the job, I have little doubt that some company would start developing remotely controlled mining equipment to extract it.
We also drill tens of thousands of wells every year. The North Sea has hundreds and hundreds of wells.
Coal and oil are found near each other, or alone. Look at maps of oil fields and coal fields. They are both formed in sedimentary rocks. Oil is usually from sea source rocks, and coal is always from land source rocks. Sometimes the sea comes in over the land, sometimes the land rises out of the sea. That's when they form together. It's always on the edge of continents where the shelf is shallow, like, say, the North Sea.
But offshore coal is not like offshore oil. It might be technically feasible to mine it - not now, but in the future. But the the extraction would proceed very slowly, the extracted volumes would be relatively small and there will not likely be rapid growth. It is the flow that matters here.
"If the incredibly high global temperatures that occurred during the Toarcian oceanic anoxic event were caused by burning a significant amount of the Earth's coal deposits within one hundred thousand years, it doesn't take much imagination to realize what will happen if we burn most of the Earth's remaining fossil fuels over the coming century, which is what we are in the process of doing," McElwain said.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/climate-05zzi.html
But, regarding Engineer Poet's enticingly simplistic missive:
The engineers are smart; they can do all kinds of things as long as someone's paying for it. What they can't do is work without money.
The people who pay for some of those things are stupid. That's you.
You are right EngPoet. Engineers will do ANYTHING for money: destroy the planet, make a better cell phone, improve the gonculator.
I have an idea. Rather than digging up all the coal and burning it at great expense in order to kill off humanity, let's just consult the greatest engineers of mass killing to ever live -- the Nazis. Surely we can learn from them.
Of course, this won't be as cool and won't involve mastaburtory back of the envelope calculations and pulp magazine renderings of undersea robots, but, hey, the Nazis did have cool uniforms. So cool, in fact, that we copied their helmets for our combat troops. Of course, that was problably done for some rational reason involving engineering.
Let's all sing a song!!! Deutschland, Deutschland, uber alles, uber alles, Deueueutschlaaaand!
I think EP's point is entirely valid. Engineers will build cell phones and XBoxes because people will pay for them. We may well argue that it is a pointless waste of time and energy, but at the end of the day consumers still want this crap, and you can make a living producing it.
Engineers could design more sustainable living arrangements where you wouldn't need a car, but right now in 2006, how many people out there would want to live in the manner? Until the public at large changes attitudes about living, Engineers will work on the things that people are willing to pay them for. Engineers could even provide options and show how to build sustainable living arrangements, but consumer attitudes need to start to change first.
I'm willing to kill people if they threaten to kill me. I'm willing to take this to the scale of nations if the national ethos is behind the death threat, but that's as far as I go. You place no such limits on yourself.
Or maybe it's just time to increase your medication.
Hell, what do I know? It may just be that the Intelligent Designer burned the stuff by miraculous interdiction to get some carbon back into the atmosphere so he could start designing primate DNA.
I understand that if you are not a Nature subscriber, you cannot view the original 26 May 2005 scientific paper in Nature. But did you even bother to read the free spacedaily.com link about the paper?
The combustion of the Antarctic coal seam 183 megayears ago is proven. It was close to the surface. It burned in the same manner as the Pennsylvania coal fires, some of which are over 100 years old. The fires in Antarctica buring for about 100,000 years, causing a major extinction.
It IS the flow that matters. This deposit reminds me of the Polish lottery win - $3 million paid at the rate of $1 per day. Not very useful.
I put in this new figure and the peak changed to 2086 however most chillingly the CO2 that results from this is 3.5 times the present level of 370ppm.
Again the sheet is very basic and probably is not correct however it gives an idea of how growth in demand can overwhealm any resource no matter how large.
You can have a look at it at:
http://stevegloor.typepad.com/sgloor/2005/12/coal_reserves.html
and plug in your own numbers.