The Oil Drum

This is a post by Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow of The Post Carbon Institute and author of Peak Everything, The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World, and The Oil Depletion Protocol. A special thanks to Global Public Media for facilitating publication of Heinberg's work; GPM is a wonderful resource and plays an important role in peak oil activism. This article is a draft chapter from a forthcoming book, currently titled Coal’s Future/Earth’s Fate.

With oil and natural gas prices rising and coal prices still relatively low, the return of the US to a greater reliance on coal might seem inevitable. However, several recent reports suggest that coal reserves, which have shrunk dramatically during the past century, may still be overstated. Coal prices are likely to rise precipitously during the next two decades due to transport bottlenecks and higher transport costs, falling production trends in many current producing regions, and the lack of suitable new coalfields. This information should give pause to any agency planning new coal power plants today.

An empirical study of the impact producing at below capacity has on the Qt intercept of a Hubbert Linearisation (HL) shows exact proportionality. If a country produces at 90% of capacity, the Qt intercept is 90% of actual URR (ultimate recoverable reserves) and so forth.

On this basis the following methodology for applying HL is proposed.