Burning the Furniture - Heinberg on the future of coal

[GliderGuider]

For those of us worried about the trajectory of coal use in a warming post-Peak Oil world, this essay is immensely important.

Burning the Furniture

A soon-to-be-released study by the Energy Watch Group in Germany on the future of global coal supplies has implications so surprising and far-reaching that energy policymakers may take years to digest it. This essay is intended to help speed that process. The report’s central conclusion is that minable global coal reserves are much smaller than is commonly thought, and that a peak in world coal production is likely within only ten to fifteen years.

And an evocative graph:



From the conclusions section:

Given the nature of its findings, the EWG coal report should be regarded with utmost seriousness. Those findings must be examined carefully and checked against other studies (I am aware of a similar study under way in the Netherlands; as soon as it is available I plan to write a follow-up article to compare its results with those of the EWG). If the data and analysis described here hold up, the implications must be faced. World energy will begin to decline very soon, and there probably is no supply-side fix. The most important policies will be ones that have to do with proactive energy curtailment and systemic societal adjustment to lower consumption levels. Those policies will necessarily impact agriculture, transport, trade, urban design, and national electrical grid systems—and everything dependent on them, including global telecommunications.

It's a long essay, but it looks like a very important one, from the perspectives of both energy and climate change.

[phantom power]

1. Damn.

Like so many other things, it looks like the timing will be just right to kick us in the kidneys while climate crisis is kicking our teeth in.

[conning]

2. Very important essay indeed

"Curtailment" of energy use is going to be necessary. He says that 87% of the 400 quadrillion btus that the world uses annually comes from fossil fuels, all of which appear to be closing in on their respective peaks of productions. The USA uses a little more than 100 quads. According to an analysis done by Pat Murphy of Community Solutions, the average American uses a little less than 340,000,000 btus annually, of which approximately 150,000,000 are under some direct personal control as they are attributed to personal transportion, the home, and food.

Eating locally, then, becomes a strategy of curtailment of energy use.

Hillary Clinton was intrigued with Al Gore's idea of a "ConnieMae" approach to the financing of home energy efficiency improvements at yesterday's hearing in the Senate. As Gore said, the home (and the too many other buildings we have) are the main source of green house gas pollution.

For some reason, curtailment of personal automotive transportation seems to be the most difficult of all for most people.

[jpak]

3. Renewable Energy

Renewable Energy Renewable Energy Renewable Energy Renewable Energy Renewable Energy Renewable Energy Renewable Energy Renewable Energy Renewable Energy Renewable Energy Renewable Energy Renewable Energy Renewable Energy Renewable Energy Renewable Energy Renewable Energy Renewable Energy Renewable Energy Renewable Energy Renewable Energy

Sorry, can't say it enough...

:evilgrin:

[NickB79]

4. Two other words also come to mind

Dieoff, dieoff, dieoff

Powerdown, powerdown, powerdown

As GliderGuider showed with his graph in this thread (http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x88105#88143), we currently get the vast majority of our energy from non-renewable resources. We know oil is peaking as we speak, we know natural gas only has a few years to go after oil peaks, you have posted links indicating uranium may be peaking, and now this shows coal will peak in 15 years or less. At the same time climate change will be devastating farmland and coastal areas around the globe. It seems it will be impossible to sustain our "American" way of life, much less the lives of billions of people around the world, as all of our current energy sources go into decline.

GliderGuider's estimate that world population will top our around 7.5 billion in 2020 and then crash after that to less than one billion by 2100 may actually be an optimistic scenario.

[jpak]

8. Current US production of (bio)ethanol and biodiesel could replace nearly all

gasoline and diesel used by the US agricultural sector today.

Solar thermal systems and biomass can replace propane used for crop drying.

Organic agriculture is far more climate change resistant than conventional agriculture.

I don't doubt for a minute that there are "limits to growth" or that our current American lifestyle is unsustainable.

But I don't subscribe to the Impending Soylent Green Scenario either.

With proper policies and foresight, the worst can be avoided...we have the technology...

[GliderGuider]

9. That sounds really great.

But it's words. Look at the numbers.

About 4 billion gallons of ethanol and 75 million gallons of biodiesel were produced in the USA in 2005. That's a lot, right? Well, once you convert the ethanol to the energy-equivalent of petroleum the 4 billion gallons shrinks to 2.65 billion gallons of oil equivalent. Add the 75 million gallons of biodiesel and you have 2.715 billion gallons of oil-equivalent. Divide by 42 for barrels and you get 64.6 million barrels of oil equivalent. Divide by 365 and you get 177,000 boe/day.

The USA uses 20,000,000 boe/day. The biofuels represent 0.9% of that, before you consider that the net energy difference effectively cuts the that number in half.

So the miracle is not that biofuels can do so much, but rather that it takes so little to replace "nearly all the gasoline and diesel used by the US agricultural sector today." Words are nice, but I trust numbers a lot more.

[jpak]

13. And again we see the Nonsense Canard winging through the sky

"biofuels-have-to-replace-all-petroleum-demand-to-be-important"

When the petroleum is gone - biofuels will represent what part of US energy consumption????

We will rejoice over every single precious drop of it.

[GliderGuider]

15. Please do me the courtesy

of acknowledging that I have never said any such thing as "biofuels-have-to-replace-all-petroleum-demand-to-be-important."

Now who's flying the dizzy duck? If the USA ever gets down to a couple of million barrels per day it will have such big problems that ethanol will be more useful as booze than motor fuel.

[GliderGuider]

5. This should be sounding a cautionary alarm for everyone.

Heinberg's article strikes me as crucially important. If we are in fact going to be facing an across-the-board fossil fuel crisis in the near future, we'd best be ready to make some hard decisions on adaptation, curtailment and substitution. We probably won't but it would be nice if we had good data just in case someone decided to do something sensible.

On that note, if all FF's start to decline, the pressure on biofuels is going to become enormous, as jpak indicates above. Just for shits and grins, the other day I did a calculation: if we took all the world's vegetable food crops and turned them into fuel, how much oil equivalent would we end up with? Here's the quote from the biofuels article on my web site:

How much oil-equivalent biofuel could we actually make if we turned all the world's major grain and oilseed crops into automobile fuel, leaving none whatever for food? In other words, what are humanity's relative energy requirements for food and transportation? Would their scales of use allow us to easily and effectively substitute a portion of our food energy use for transportation fuel?

To answer this question I considered ethanol from corn, wheat, rice, sugar cane and sugar beets, and biodiesel from soybeans and rapeseed (canola), plus palm&sunflower oils. In each case I converted the entire world crop into fuel, discounted the ethanol by 1/3 for its lower energy content, and converted the annual production in litres to the oil-industry standard measure of millions of barrels of oil equivalent per day. Here are the results:

Ethanol

Corn:
World crop (Million tonnes): 700
Litres per tonne: 400
MBOE/day: 3.2

Wheat:
World crop (Million tonnes): 600
Litres per tonne: 370
MBOE/day: 2.5

Rice:
World crop (Million tonnes): 600
Litres per tonne: 400
MBOE/day: 2.7

Sugar Cane:
World crop (Million tonnes): 1324
Litres per tonne: 100
MBOE/day: 2.5

Sugar Beets:
World crop (Million tonnes): 250
Litres per tonne: 108
MBOE/day: 0.3

Biodiesel

Soybeans:
World crop (Million tonnes): 270
Litres per tonne: 140
MBOE/day: 0.5

Rapeseed (Canola):
World crop (Million tonnes): 55
Litres per tonne: 400
MBOE/day: 0.4

Palm&Sunflower oils:
World crop (Million tonnes): 42
Litres per tonne: 900
MBOE/day: 0.7

The total from turning virtually all of our food into fuel is 12.8 MBOE/day - only 15% of the current world oil consumption of 84 million barrels per day. To make matters worse, it takes a lot more energy to make biofuels than it does to simply pump oil from the ground and refine it. A rough estimate is that it takes at least twice as much. Accounting for this necessary energy outlay reduces the available net energy of our biofuels to less than 8% of the world's oil consumption.

This is one of the reasons why using crop-sourced biofuels for transportation is such a horrifically bad idea. We strip mine our top soil, we deplete our water tables, we starve everyone and we still have only an 8% solution. We all - individuals, countries and our whole civilization - need to be very, very cautious in promoting the use of biofuels, lest our thirst for transportation fuel overrun our common sense. And we must always remember to crunch the numbers.

This is what Heinberg means by the phrase "burning the furniture". There will be an enormous temptation to use food as fuel, especially if the shortages start to bite before cellulosic or algal technologies are ready for prime time. This will be doubly tempting if it looks like we can use someone else's food as fuel.

[jpak]

6. Nonsense and more nonsense

No one has ever claimed that biofuels could replace petroleum and no one has ever advocated that we use 100% of the planet's agricultural output for biofuels.

Dumbest...claims...ever...

[GliderGuider]

7. You don't get the message inherent in this calculation.

I'm not saying we should turn all our food into fuel. Nobody is saying that, or claiming that biofuels can replace all petroleum. What people are hoping is that biofuels will be able to replace some useful fraction of petroleum. This calculation shows that to be a forlorn hope.

Every percent of petroleum we replace by crop-sourced biofuels implies a 12%+ reduction in the food supply. While this might be acceptable in very small, localized applications, it will not (must not) be part of the global solution set if we begin to see multi-percent declines in fossil fuels. Trying to make it play such a role would amount to doing what some farmers were forced to do in the depths of the Great Depression - burn their seed corn for heat.

We need to be aware that at some point in the deployment of biofuels we might cross the line from "small-scale petroleum extender" to "burning the seed corn". We need to be aware of the issues surrounding biofuels so we can resist crossing that line, because the pressure to cross it will become enormous.

[jpak]

10. As I posted above - current US ethanol and biodiesel production (on a volume basis)

could replace (nearly) all current liquid fuel demand in the US sgricultural sector.

Is this a "useful fraction" of the US economy???

I think it is.

Others obviously don't.

[phantom power]

11. Agriculture is an important component of our economy.

0.9% of our current fuel use is not a useful fraction of our economy's fuel use.

Easy distinction to make, no?

[jpak]

12. and the power produced by US communication satellite PV cells is puny too

but their importance to the US economy is far greater than micro-watts they produce.

Same with US agriculture - You Gotta Eat.

And (again) falling into nonsense trap that biofuels-must-replace-all-petroleum-to-be-important is...well...nonsense...

[GliderGuider]

14. Keep in mind that satellite solar panels function in a very constrained context

The fact that they perform extremely well in that context compared to any of the other potentially competing power sources gives them a value beyond their economic cost per watt. The same cannot be said of biofuels, that compete directly with petroleum in the same context.

Nobody is saying biofuels have to replace all petroleum. Why do you persist in misrepresenting your opponents? Your arguments should be able to stand on their own. This tactic is too Republican for a member of this board.

[jpak]

16. The contradictions are obvious...

"Nobody is saying biofuels have to replace all petroleum."

"The same cannot be said of biofuels, that compete directly with petroleum in the same context."

The biofuels-ain't-squat canard is central to the anti-biofuel argument and that it why I repeatedly emphasize this.

and again - after the oil wells (or the Alberta Tar Sands or coal liquids) play out - biofuels (and other renewable energy sources) will be all we will have to sustain key elements of our economy (i.e., agriculture, essential transport).

If people don't want to recognize this - then I'm sorry...

Also, it's "republic" not "republican" - get with the plan Mr North of the Border.

:P