Interview with Jean Laherrère (studies Peak Coal)

[phantom power]

Interesting figures for China. Their national peak for coal is pretty near-term, for a country installing 2.2 gigawatts of coal generation each week.

TOD:E : You have been calling for a thorough assessment of future Coal production for some time, claiming that Coal has been wrongly regarded as a virtually infinite resource, and that it will likely peak circa 2050. Since the beginning of the year we had several studies made public, that not only confirm your views on Coal, but show a peak even sooner. Remarkably, two different studies, one by the Energy Watch Group (EWG), another by David Rutledge (California Institute of Technology) point to a Coal peak by 2025. What do you think of these studies?

JL : Both studies are good and rely on BGR (German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources) reserves and resources presently known, but it is hard from BGR data to estimate the coal ultimate recovery, because most of coal resources will stay as resources in the ground without being converted into reserves. The Zittel group (EWG) is right to say that data is of poor quality, because contrary to oil and gas there is no scout company collecting technical coal data and compiling a homogeneous world coal inventory. IEA, WEC just give the list of what national agencies report and these data are heterogeneous because nations usually report very optimistic values and there are no strict rules of coal reserves (and resources) definitions. There is always confusion between reserves and resources.

Furthermore in oil and gas fields, pressure gives an indication of the decline, there is not such thing in coal production. Also the conversion of hard and brown coal into barrels of oil equivalent (boe) is difficult and usually a wild guess.

My coal ultimate is 1000 Gt (or 600 Gtoe), because in front of uncertainty I prefer to choose a round number than an accurate wrong one. Using the Hubbert Linearization can lead to wrong estimate when the plot displays several linear parts.

(...)

The main coal producer China is difficult to forecast because of the unreliability of data, but using an ultimate of 150 Gt (past production 40 Gt plus the 114 Gt EIA estimate) the peak is around 2,5 Gt (2,2 in 2005) in 2020, in agreement with Zittel. This explains why China is already importing coal. But BGR reports for China remaining reserves of 115 Gt but also 975 Gt of resources. How much of those resources will be converted into reserves?

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/2832#more