The Oil Drum

Ah! Do we really need six pages of comment? Thank you at the back, we'll gladly cut it short. Suffice it to say I had the chance to split part of a bottle of wine with Ken Deffeyes (we talked a little about Abu Sa'fah the first indication of Saudi depletion, since the combined 800 kbd from it and Qatif were designated purely to match declines in existing fields at the time they came on stream.) There were a couple of short chats with Governor Schweitzer of Montana about 5-micron coal and a recognition, as the talks went on through the afternoon, that maybe the ground is changing.

But first an admission - they caught me out. Since Dr James Hansen had to be recognized as one of the Time 100 Folk of the Year, later this afternoon, they moved his talk up, and so sadly I missed the first bit. So this is where I put in another plug for the web site (URL corrected here and earlier), to get the Powerpoints. His message, as I caught it, was largely that we can only afford to raise the temperature of the planet one single degree Centigrade, and beyond that the historic record suggests catastrophe. One part of this is the melting of the polar ice caps, and, in this regard he showed the melt pictures and the latest measurements of the weight of Greenland (from one of the satellites). What is interesting in that, is that the last couple of years seemed to have created more of a trend out of the data. He commented (perhaps in response to Dr Crichton) that this may provided more reliable data than models.

Part of the problem with coal is that, when it was first grown (as in the peat bogs back when) the region was occasionally inundated with floods, and, as the Hurricanes showed last year, this carried mud and sand into the bog. Over the passage of time, as the bog turned from peat to brown coal, and then into coal itself, these dirt bands turned into sandstone, mudstones and other rocks. The layers are often found inter-layered within a coal seam, either as very thin stringers, or as partings that can separate a single seam into layers that end up several feet apart. The bedding planes and vertical joints (referred to as cleat) provide the permeable paths through the coal, and are often partially filled with additional minerals that deposit out of the water that percolated through the coal at one time. This can also introduce lenses of pyrite and calcite, so that coal is not the simple carbon lump that people often anticipate.

This is another in the short technical posts that show up at weekends, dealing with one aspect or another of fossil fuel production. Given that, as Super G noted the Governor of Montana was on 60 minutes tonight, it seemed like a good time to return to a coal-related theme. A list of related posts will be appended at the end of this one, and relate to the mining of coal, either on the surface or from underground, though it is the surface mining of coal, that currently entices the Montana Governor. It should be noted that the adjacent state of Wyoming produces around 400 million short tons a year of coal, about ten times the current production from Montana.