The recent IEA report on global energy use trends contained a bit of a surprise. If oil prices remain high and governments make progress on their emissions goals, there's a possibility that the world has already hit peak oil, and that the next few years will see its use plateau for a while before dropping again. Using these same assumptions, the report also said that we could hit peak coal somewhere within the next 20 years. In today's edition of Nature, a commentary suggests that, even skipping those same assumptions, we may hit peak coal before too long, simply because the best and cheapest sources are vanishing fast.
The authors of the comment unquestionably have an agenda; they come from the Post-Carbon Institute, which clearly has an interest in promoting consideration of a world that doesn't run on fossil fuels. And that agenda is obvious in the article summary, which concludes, "Energy policies relying on cheap coal have no future."
That appears to be in sharp contrast to various estimates that suggest the world's coal supply is enough to keep us going for up to several hundred years. But the key word in the sentence is "cheap." The authors don't deny that there's a lot of coal left out there—although they say it's less than most people think—but they argue that actually using it will get progressively more expensive, a trend that will ultimately make relying on cheap coal a losing proposition.
The authors provide some pretty simple evidence:
for the past couple of decades, the projected global supply has been dropping at a rate faster than consumption, which suggests that there's something off with the projections. They blame advances in geology, which have led a number of nations to decide that some reserves that were once thought to be economically recoverable really aren't. For example, South Africa and Germany, which between them have just under 10 percent of the global reserves, have recently seen their estimated recoverable reserves drop more than a third over a five-year span. There could also be some ugly surprises in this area as well. The US, which has over a quarter of the estimated global reserves, hasn't updated its estimate since the 1970s.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/11/should-we-be-planning-for-the-end-of-cheap-coal.ars---
Wonderful. I didn't put this in a "quote" because for non-donating members DU loves to place a big flash add there and screws up the quote. :P
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