Citizen Power

A new podcast I listen to is from Science Magazine.  It’s pretty good for a strictly science podcast, and it covers a lot of topics.  A recent show discussed something I hadn’t really thought about much before — the invitable end of coal, aka Peak Coal.   Like other forms of fossil fuels, coal is finite and one day it will run out.  When that will happen, according to Science Magazine,  is sooner rather than later, which was surprising to me.   But in fact, the best thing about coal is that it will run out, which people in the coal industry don’t seem to be considering either.  Unfortunately, clean sources of energy like lithium and uranium will also run out — unless we find ways to mine it on another planet or the moon.  Obviously, many things in our small universe are finite. That goes also for oil and gas, no matter how many bazillions of gallons of it are claimed that we have.   The big question is, do we want to pollute the planet as it runs out, or just leave it where it is, underground, and use something else?  We could use an “infinite” form of energy instead, like wind or solar, instead of coal.   Geotheormal energy is also infinite, or at least it will last as long as the earth itself lasts.

Reserves of coal could last about 130 years, or they may peak as early as 2020 and taper off slowly, depending on how much the world still depends on coal in 20 years.  How bad would greenhouse warming get from burning the remaining coal?

It’s hard to estimate exactly, but one scientist feels it might not be as bad as people thought, because coal might peak and run out sooner than previously thought.   The new approach is sobering — early estimates suggest that we could run out sometime this century, at least.  How are the estimates being made?  Holes are drilled and then geologists and research assessment people are brought in to determine how much is left and whether or not it would be worth it to get it out of the ground.   One question they ask is how much coal has been produced in the last 100s of years?  They take that data and through simple plotting of historical production, they determine how much coal is ever going to be produced from a particular region. Great Britain reached its peak, for example in 1913.  There isn’t much time left for UK coal production at all.

Using the same techniques, they are looking at North America and other areas that haven’t peaked yet.  The bottom line, they have determined, is that coal will run out in a couple of decades.  One recent study found it will peak in 2020 — that’s not very long from now at all.

Are the statistics accurate?  M.King Hubbard, who worked for the US Geological Survey, came up with a  method of measuring remaining energy sources decades ago,  for oil. He applied it to the U.S. oil production in the 1950s, and at the time, he said oil production would peak in the 1970s — which it did.   (Using known oil fields at the time).   So they have applied this method to world oil and it seems to be accurate also, telling us that  oil is peaking right about now, or already has.  World oil production hasn’t gone anywhere since 2005, and so this method has more or less worked.  This method is the one used to show that coal will peak by about 2020 and then taper off.

If we burn all the world’s coal, which we could do in a few decades, how bad would that make climate change?  With all this coal — 4 trillion tons of coal in the U.S. alone — burning all of that could be devastating.   Environmentalists feel we could burn all this coal, and then it would be used up; and the theory goes, we’d have a “scorched earth”. But new estimates say it wouldn’t be that awful since it’s not possible to get all the coal out of the ground. It’s a tricky area to go in, and climate people would like to have the answer as soon as possible.

General info. from Dick Kerr, for the Science Magazine podcast.

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