Big Coal's Boom Days Could Soon Be Over
Two professors have stirred the pot with what has to be one of the bigger man-bites-dog stories of the year coming from the energy world.
Their conclusion: No need to worry about climate change because there isn’t enough cheap coal around to create a problem.
In an article published recently in the journal Energy, the profs, Tadeusz Patzek from the University of Texas, and Gregory Croft from UC Berkeley, estimate that “peak coal” will arrive in 2011 – meaning the world is burning through 7 billion tons of black diamonds every year and that’s about as good as it's going to get.
There is lots of coal left, but much of it would be too costly to mine, they argue. Alaska, for example, has huge potential coal reserves on the North Slope, but getting the stuff to market would be a herculean undertaking. How long have we been arguing about building a gas pipeline from the Slope? Imagine, then the economic and political obstacles to building coal terminals up there.
By 2037, Patzek and Croft estimate, global carbon dioxide emissions from coal will fall to 1990 levels. By 2047, estimated emissions will be down 50 percent from their peak.
At news of the article, coal industry reps rushed out statements that amounted to “you gotta be kidding.” Peak coal? Pshaw! Double pshaw! The U.S. has centuries worth of coal, the National Mining Association harrumphed.
To be exact, the U.S. has more than 261 billion tons of recoverable reserves, according to Energy Information Administration stats, equivalent to about 230 years’ worth of U.S. consumption at 2007 usage rates, the last year before the recession took a bite out of energy demand.
Peak coal concerns give enviros another argument to talk up non-carbon energy alternatives, but they took strong exception to the professors’ conclusion that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has over-estimated future CO2 emissions due to faulty assumptions about coal abundance, and accordingly, its global temperature increase projections are off base.
Still, it’s worth hearing the pair out because they’re not the only energy geeks who have dug into coal supply numbers.
In 2008, for example, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) took a look at the mammoth Gillette field in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, the most productive coal region in the U.S. Some 77 billion tons – some 80 years worth at present consumption rates - could be recovered from Gillette if money were no object, USGS said.
Money, however, is always the object. Coal is not mined to create jobs for hard-working folk or to keep Americans cuddly warm at night. Coal is mined for profit. All else is commentary.
To earn an 8 percent rate of return at today’s spot price of some $15 per ton for Powder River Basin coal, fewer than 20 billion tons from Gillette would be economical to mine, according to the USGS study’s cost curve. The curve shows that the per-ton price would have to rise to $60 for all 77 billion tons to be economically recoverable.
In 2007, the National Academy of Sciences published a study that splashed cold water on don’t-worry-be-happy statements that the U.S. has 250 or so years worth of coal left.
“A combination of increased rates of production with more detailed reserve analyses that take into account location, quality, recoverability, and transportation issues may substantially reduce the number of years of supply,” the academy report said.
The scientists who wrote the report suggested that the U.S. has enough coal to meet present consumption rates for at least 100 years. Beyond that, nobody knows.
And watch that caveat – “present consumption rates.” Let’s say that the coal industry is right. Say we have 300 years worth of coal at present consumption rates. Don’t forget your exponential math. If consumption were to grow 1 percent each year, that 300-year resource base would drop by more than half. At a 2 percent annual growth rate, the resource would last less than a century.
Colorado University nuclear physics professor emeritus Al Bartlett likes to say: “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
So, that bituminous security blanket might not be as snug as it’s been made out to be. To borrow a chorus from an old John Prine song:
And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County,
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay.
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.