Coal - enough for 6OO yrs?

[oscar111]

is my memory right on that?

And BTW, if we do have that much coal, why the fuss about running low on oil?

Coal could run city electrics, and charge up elec. cars.

Is it 6OO years for the coal reserves? Did i recall it right?

[Massacure]

1. It depends on who you ask. It ranges anywhere from 200-600 years.

You need a lot of heavy machines to mine it though, so as the price of crude increases, so deos the cost of coal.

[oscar111]

4. "heavy mach 2 mine".. but they could be powered by elec cords at a mine,

the cords from a city utility fed by coal.

heavy trucks, electric batt power, again recharged from an outlet fm city electric run by coal.

[Coastie for Truth]

26. Instead of crude you use Fischer Tropsch fuel from coal N/T

[Massacure]

31. Dirty with a capital D.

[Coastie for Truth]

32. I always had upper repiratory "things" when coal was used for

home heating. Cleared up when Pittsburgh banned coal for heating.

[punpirate]

2. Well, I think that's an optimistic assessment...

... two hundred years might be more in order. Any more is predicated on some environmentally damaging mining methods. Beyond that, coal is inherently dirty and doesn't solve any problems with regard to CO2 balance--makes that just as bad as oil. Coal gasification might provide some fuel for cars, but it's not a particularly cheap process (although cost might be much less a factor when oil costs skyrocket).

Coal might be a stopgap, but it's not a solution. And it's not environmentally friendly.

Its advantage is that it's still cheap. And that's its only advantage. Mercury contamination of waterways, oceans and sewage waste because of coal combustion will get much worse with increased coal use.

Much better, if you're talking about electric generation for electric cars is to use the oil or coal available now to make solar cells to charge those batteries later. Of course, that requires further research into long-lasting cells, something not yet available, and which has been underfunded for decades.

Cheers.

[rfkrfk]

13. the advantage with coal --> production can expand

also, production can expand worldwide.
That would be especially important in countries that
do not have Kyoto Treaty annex-one limitations on CO2.
The production of pumpable aka conventional crude oil
seems to be maxxed out.

Someday, the Chinese might find out that
methanol can be made from coal.

[punpirate]

14. But, that wasn't the direction of the question...

... it was about the US and coal. And what I said about CO2 and environmental problems still stand--no matter where that coal comes from. I know whereof I speak. Tell me what you know about coal ash.

[rfkrfk]

15. my guess is...

coal ash is not very nice.
I assume it is used in roadmaking concrete,
buried as toxic waste, or something similiar.

[punpirate]

17. It's one of those sources of mercury...

... which eventually leaches out of every use to which it's put. I spent almost six years doing physical coal-cleaning research in the `80s. Environmentally, coal is nasty stuff--one has to put the by-products somewhere, and wherever it's put, it eventually causes a problem. And not all of the waste stream can be removed from the stack.

Beyond that, even with conversion to coal gas, there's leftovers and CO2 production. It's a stopgap, not a solution.

Cheers.

[jpak]

19. Virtually all PV modules on the market today have 25+ year warranties

That is, they will maintain 80% of their name-plate output for at least 25 years.

Current PV modules will produce at least 50% of their name-plate capacity for 40-70 years.

[punpirate]

20. They'll have to last longer than that...

... and be cheaper to be actually useful, if oil dries up--because if oil dries up, there's no easy and cheap way to make the electricity to make more cells.

I'm glad you mention this, because I'm going by older data, where the warranties were about 75% shorter. But, what is the good of losing 50% of capacity over 20-30 years--that would require purchasing approximately 100% excess capacity initially. Not a good buy, and one of the reasons I suggest more work is needed.

BTW, ShellSolar's limited warranty is 20 years....

Cheers, and thanks for the update.

[jpak]

21. The principal components of PV modules are completely recyclable

the glazing

the aluminum back panel

and the silicon in the PV cells

They aren't once-through throw-away items...and can be re-manufactured at a fraction of their original energy cost.

[punpirate]

22. That's good to know...

... but what's the fraction? Will that fraction be recyclable with reduced energy supplies later? Is anyone set up to do recycling now or is planning to do so in the foreseeable future?

Cheers.

[punpirate]

23. Now, I'm only giving you a slightly hard time...

... because you're not forthcoming with much hard info--which I would like to see.

I used to teach this stuff twenty-five years ago, but haven't had much need to keep up with it for a couple of decades, so I am curious about the state of the current technology. Of interest would be the sustainability of the industry when fossil fuels begin to dry up, what the installed costs per watt are now, etc.

Cheers.

[Coastie for Truth]

27. Mixed mind on coal

Motor Fuel From Coal "Fischer-Tropsch" Process. The Germans used it during WW2. It's feasible. The problem was economic - it was just enough more expensive then crude that OPEC could drop the price to discourage investment.

Environment - I grew up in Southwestern Pennsylvania - before Pittsburgh banned coal for home heating. Terrible - but it beats starving or a decades long Great Depression.

My fear is that coal - even with its many drawbacks - will provide a reason for delay.

[slor]

3. Not to mention the effects on our environment...

why not push renewables?

[oscar111]

7. cars not methane, but electric fm city utility fed by coal

was what i had in mind. No oil/methane needed.

not pushing for coal in particular, i also like your idea of renewables, like cornstalks fermented or however that path works out.

[unhappycamper]

5. I don't think the ocean will rise enough to flood the coal fields,

but cold weather gear will be required when working outside. Continue capping those mountains, boys.

Read:
Frozen Earth
The Two-Mile Time Machine
The Little Ice Age

[demosincebirth]

6. We have one of the largest coal reserves in the world.

Problem is that it cost too much to clean the emisions.

[oscar111]

9. COAL POLLUTION VS. GASOLNE POLLUTION

which more expensive to control?

we have lived somehow with the cost of gasoline pollution control methods, so wil we not be able to "live ' with coal pollution control costs?

Or is coal P. so much more expensive to control, that the economy will swish down the tubes?

[BlueEyedSon]

8. It's filthy, more expensive (by the time you synthesis the liquid or gas

fuels), and the burning any fossil fuel will exacerbate the CO2 greenhouse effect.

[WePurrsevere]

10. At the present rate of usage...

that figure may be right BUT if you think about it... as oil resources deplete, coal usage will probably increase and if so the amount available would go decrease rapidly.

IMO supposedly having coal available is not a good excuse to not get our butts researching and setting up clean and alternative energy sources.

[jpak]

18. Exactly

At the current rate of consumption, US coal reserves would be depleted in ~1500 years.

If consumption increased at 5% per year, they would only last 86 years..

http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/society/fossilfuels.htm.

[mcscajun]

11. The latest television commercials by General Electric

are promoting "clean-burning coal", saying we're sitting on enough to last 250 years (if memory serves).

If you've seen the commercial, it's pretty bizarre. It's filmed in high contrast and set deep inside a coal mine (supposedly -- I'm sure it's a set) with the "coal miners" in question being portrayed by sweat-slicked white women (they all look like fashion models) and large, muscular, also sweat-slicked black men set to the old song about coal mining "Sixteen Tons". The women are the ones put center stage, while the men are mostly backdrop. The choice of music is, in itself, pretty bizarre, as this song didn't make Coal mining attractive, which it could never be anyhow. It was more about the despair and poverty of coal miners. A lame attempt to make coal 'sexy', with a very odd racial subtext.

[Terry in Austin]

36. Bizarre indeed

It would have made a nice piece of satire, if satire were still possible.

Looked to me like they are starting to prep the masses for a transition...

[ReadTomPaine]

12. Some additional points from the peak oil theory not to forget...

Coal isn't as energy efficient as oil - much more would have to consumed and it still wouldn't match petroleum's energy payback on the basis of energy put in to get energy out. That would cut into any supply very quickly.

Another factor to keep in mind is that petroleum is used to make everything from plastics to fertilizer. Coal can't replace it in most of those areas.

[Boomer]

24. Right, you can't eat coal

Few people seem aware of just how much the agricultural industry is dependent on fossil fuels. The so-called Green Revolution which has produced the food for billions of humans is based on fertilizers made from petroleum.

As the price of oil goes up, so will the price of food, which gets a triple whammy from fertilizer, farm machinery and distribution costs.

As the oil runs out, our productivity -- already stressed by climate change -- will fall. People will starve. Lots and lots of people.

[Coastie for Truth]

29. Crude yields linear alkanes-

Coal yields cyclics (like benzene, toluene, the polycyclics, etc.). These are actually better for plastics.

As to fertilizers - hydrogen is hydrogen - comes from coal and crude oil.

The economics "motivate" that the organics come from coal as a byproduct of metallurgical coking or Fischer Tropsch fuel and not as the primary product.

[Trillo]

38. Solar H has been made (free of carbon cycle)

http://www.hionsolar.com/n-hion96.htm

Australians researchers believe it's 7 years away:
http://www.unsw.edu.au/news/adv/articles/2004/aug/Solar_hydrogen.html

I've also read a PR recently that GE is working on solar H production methods.

[NNadir]

39. This is one of hundreds of solar hydrogen schemes I've heard

over the years.

7 years until what? Until they can "deliver" a material?

If it works - and that is a huge if - it will be many decades before it is available on scale - before its economics and performance are understood, decades before an infrastructure can be built.

We can't afford to burn coal in the interim no matter how much is in the ground. There is no solution to the waste of coal.

[Trillo]

40. "They've" been working on hydrogen for many years.

It seems to be the cleanest solution, but, of course, it's not good for the oil corporatists, so at every opportunity when someone points out wrongly that hydrogen is only separated using fossil-fuel based energy processes, I like to point out that solar hydrogen has been produced.

Regarding Nuclear, there is, as yet, no good solution for the disposal of the waste, that problem is essentially left for future generations to pay for. What are they doing with the waste right now? Storing it drums. LOL. If the disposal problem can be overcome and those disposal costs priced into the current produced product sold, then perhaps it becomes more attractive.

Coal? How much additional pollution will we suffer? What about the mercury byproduct? Can any coal based processes mitigate the mercury issue? What about the CO2 issues?

Solar hydrogen seems to be the best long-term solution for the good of the environment. Edited to add: That and conservation.

[dcfirefighter]

41. hydrogen is great for oil production companies.

because it's decades away, plenty of time for oil companies to continue profitably. They'll make just as much money on oil shale and sands as they do on easy to find oil, it'll just cost us more, and with no viable alternative we're stuck: we can't move our homes to a more convenient place, we can't get mass transit to work in 4 home per acre suburbia, we don't have reliable electric vehicles, and we don't have clean electric anyway.

Let me reiterate my feelings:

1) we can make a significant dent in our per-capita energy usage in 5 years if we start capturing the external costs of energy production (in the form of a tax on polluters, etc.). We can provide everyone, even the poor, with the cash to make those changes, by dividing that tax revenue by 300M and returning it to each citizen. Such a dividend would make fossil fuel based energy relatively more expensive than the alternatives.

2) we could halve our per capita energy usage within a decade or two, based on the idea that 1/3 of our energy goes to residential use, and 1/3 goes to transportation, and 1/3 goes to industrial. I can't speak much for the industrial, other than to say all of those horseshit ideas NNadir hates might actually come into play here. As for the other two, they are both a function of land and taxation. We can replace our building stock much quicker if we remove taxes from buildings: a 1-2% annual tax on building value is similar to a 10-30% sales tax on buildings, depending on how you do your accounting.
As for as transport costs, we must reevaluate our suburban car-centric mentality. Taxing property owners based on locational benefit would encourage those owners to develop their properties to highest and best use, or sell them to someone who would. This aggregate effect would tend to create tall, dense, cities, rather than 1 & 2 storey suburbia. It would also leave more open land for crop growth and forestry -- both of which, if done sustainably, convert carbon in the air to carbon in the soil.

3) Dense construction does more than reduce transport costs, it reduces the costs of heating and cooling, two ways: party walls don't loose or gain heat, and district heating and cooling can be used, possibly utilizing waste heat from electricity generation or other industrial processes. Regardless, any building finished tomorrow should be much more energy efficient that one in use for the last 40 years.

[Coastie for Truth]

28. When steel and coal were king--

(remember, I'm from the Metro Pittsburgh area) - most of those materials came from coal via the coke oven process. It does not pay to "harvest" chemicals from coal that is going to be burned directly for electricity, but it's relatively easy to "harvest" those feed stocks from a "by product coke oven or from a Fischer Tropsch Reactor.

Used to be a big business "When steel and coal were king."

[amazona]

16. coal kills the air and the landscape

We do have plenty of coal but the problems with coal are huge and ultimately you can't have both clean air and decently long lifespans and coal.

[Coastie for Truth]

30. You got that right.

[NNadir]

25. There will NOT be 600 years of coal. It will kill us before we burn it.

It is killing us right now, unremarked by its apologists, most of whom mutter mumbo jumbo about PV cells and horse manure (or was it cow shit?).

The tendency to regard coal's sustainability as only a function of its direct cost and its availability is nonsense. The earth's atmosphere is collapsing. Much more, every man, woman and child on the planet is contaminated coal waste. Entire ecosystems have already been destroyed, some rivers will forever be poisoned.

Simply because no one cares about these truths doesn't remove the long range consequences:

The seas are acidifying, coral reefs are collapsing, buildings are dissolving.

Still people look to coal dreaming of some stupid solar nirvana that remains always, decade after decade after decade, "just around the corner."

Burning coal is like playing Russian Roulette with a six shooter having six bullets in six chambers. We cannot afford six hundred years of coal; we cannot afford six decades; we really can't afford six years of it.

[hatrack]

33. Bear in mind that the biggest and most accessible fields are already gone

Or approaching the ends of their economically useful lives. It's very similar to the rule of thumb that the biggest and most easily exploited oil fields were the ones first discovered.

What remains tends to be lower-grade (bituminous vs. anthracite) coal, located in seams or formations which were not big/profitable enough to exploit the first time around.

I won't even go into methyl mercury, CO2, destruction of whole states which would be required in a scenario calling for full coal exploitation, since others on this thread have already done so.

[wuushew]

34. Are the Eastern high sulfur bituminous fields depleted?

I thought they stopped mining them because the cost associated with sulfur removal. Hopefully any continued use of coal would include combined cycle coal gasification which would make pollution control much easier.

[GumboYaYa]

35. Coal is the worst option available for energy IMO.

From the start to the end of the cycle of coal as energy it is bad news. Extraction destroys ecosystems, burning it pollutes the world with Sulfur Dioxide and Carbon Dioxide, and the notion that we have limitless supplies of it will permit people to delay the radical conservation that is necessary to save us from ourselves.

Anyone pushing coal as a solution does not care one whit about the environment and is selling fools gold.

[Terry in Austin]

37. Enough coal for HOW long?

The "Coal enough for 500 years" meme makes the rounds pretty often. Pick your number of centuries -- in a recent New York Times op-ed piece Ken Deffeyes softens his peak oil message with the reassuring claim that we have "300 years' worth of coal" left.

Couple of problems with that. First, oil and coal reserves are measured in barrels or tons, not units of time. Misleading, at best. Second, coming up with time estimates involves assumptions and arithmetic. Usually the assumptions involve a straight-line projection of present consumption rates. Wrong.

You can bet that when oil gets too expensive, there will be a sharp increase in the use of coal as a replacement. The projections on coal that I've seen always ignore this fact.

Modern refineries can handle liquified coal as well as petroleum, so it's realistic to expect more and more coal being used to keep the cars rolling and houses warm. Certainly, we can hope for more enlightened energy policies, and work for them, but we also have to consider the probabilities.

So, we need to figure how a coal-for-oil substitution scenario would play out. The US currently uses about 7.3 billion barrels of oil a year; it also uses 1.07 billion tons of coal, almost all of it for generating electricity. Estimates of recoverable coal reserves in the US come in at around 275 billion tons.

A little back-of-the-envelope arithmetic, then. In terms of energy content, a ton of coal is equivalent to about 3.8 barrels of oil. If we were using only coal instead of petroleum, it would create an additional demand of 1.92 billion tons of coal per year, for a total of 2.99 billion tons per year. At current rates, then, the coal reserve would last about 92 years. However, petroleum consumption historically averages about a 2.2% increase per year -- applying that same rate to coal use, the estimate drops from 92 years to 53 years.

The 500-year estimate, wherever it came from, is apparently off by an order of magnitude, and that's just for the U.S.

Sources:

"Clean Energy" Facts
DOE on coal reserves - intro
DOE on coal reserves - details
DOE - coal reserves white paper
USGS - coal reserves
DOE/EIA - current consumption figures
Equivalent energy