peak coal

PEAK COAL


Don’t think I don’t hear the sighs and groans, nor think I didn’t notice the eye rolling and the miming of vomiting by finger down throat. Oh Baby Lord Jesus, save us from yet another peak oil tirade. Even from one as worthy and all knowing as Lord Bison. Hear that buzzer? That means, wrong friggin answer. This ties in with our just completed “four years to zero imports”, which, by the way, I’ll give you the source articles at the end of this piece. It is very important that you realize that coal, nuclear, room temperature fusion, nor any other magical source of energy is going to come to the rescue. Our energy future looks almost as dire as our economic one. Although it is all tied in together. You can’t have one without the other. Not including both ( such as economists have been guilty of for decades by not including energy into their calculations-thanks a lot you over-educated moronic simpletons ) is like saying that all that matters is the amount of your paycheck without factoring cost of living, your ability to commute if at all, and the state of your health which enables you to work. Energy decline, or even energy plateau, impacts the economy which further complicates the energy problem, etc.

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Coal production has peaked. And, the net available energy from coal has already peaked. It isn’t very complicated. We are mining more and more and receiving less BTU’s from the total amount. That fabled 250 years of remaining coal? That is based on current consumption rates. Yet coal production has increased every year since the 1940’s. We don’t ever hold at current levels, we always use more energy. At least, we did. Now all our energy inputs decline every year. As our population increases. But, to return to “current levels of use”. Given that our economy MUST grow to survive, if you take the last twenty years of coal production growth you find that instead of having 250 years of coal left we only have 94, at the most. Coal use won’t remain frozen on the demand side. It will increase. It always has. And demand will continue to increase even as supply doesn’t. 250 years is smoke up our asses. Now, that is bad enough news. Under a century to go for coal. But wait, that’s the best of the bad news. That is just for our electrical production ( half of all grid power is produced by coal and no other combination of sources come close ). Which, according to our very own government which normally underestimated bad news by a wide margin, seems to have itself peaked by watts produced in 2007. But we won’t even open that can of worms.

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The far worse news is that total production of coal peaked in 1999. All grades, from rich to poor in energy output. If you look at the total energy derived from all the coal produced, we hit our peak in net energy as far back as 1990. We’ve mined a lot more, but our total delivered BTU’s haven’t budged. They are at a plateau. Thank goodness it has yet to decline. But, that is pretty much any day now. Your richest coal, in terms of energy delivered per unit, is anthracite grade. That is pretty much gone. One hundred years of steady growth in its extraction and the remaining yield is close to nothing. The next best grade of coal is bituminous. When the anthracite started running out we started mining a lot more bituminous, until we hit the peak of that production in 1990. Since then the yield has gone from 700 million tons down to just 500. So we started extracting more and more subbituminous. That might, and I say might because it is too early to tell, have peaked in 2005. Which only leaves the crap coal, lignite. I’m sure we have plenty of that, but it won’t help if our total energy yield is decreasing, will it?

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If 2005 saw the peak in subbituminous then we will see a fall from the plateau of energy yield. But even if it didn’t, no growth is almost as bad. Population growth alone, irregardless of the economic demands of growth, will demand more energy from electricity. We are already screwed just from that standpoint. Our petroleum supply has shrunk 20%, and our coal supply at best is stable. And, even if we were to somehow wiggle our magic noses and conjure up out of thin air the needed liquefaction plants to turn coal into transportation fuel ( itself questionable given our economy ), that would mean far less fuel available for the electrical grid.

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Nuclear power only supplies 8% of our electricity. And you can’t scale that up because, if nothing else although there are a lot of other “else’s”, of the fuel issue. We only produce one sixth of our own uranium, having peaked decades ago, and most of the ore mines are very low yield ( a few Canadian mines yield 20% purity but most global sources are 1/10 of 1% which are two thousand times more dilute- that requires a lot of energy to extract ). As of today, without any new plant construction, uranium mines are barely keeping up with demand. Hydro power is a non-answer. Not only have all our potential sources been dammed and put to use ( on an industrial scale, home/village use being another story ), a lot of those get a decline due to decreasing snow pack. Solar and wind are great for local, low yield production. To scale up we would need MORE energy and ore. But currently, and for the last few years, both have been in decline. The time to build your alternate energy production is before peak energy hits, so we are too late. A decline in energy has seen a scramble to halt the economic hemorrhaging, not a sensible last minute crash course to save our future asses. As an individual you can easily procure a future source of energy. Collectively as a nation and as an economy, it is already game over. The fat lady hasn’t come out to sing, but she’s just behind the curtain.

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Now that we know coal can’t save us, on to my source material for the “four years to import zero”. This of course was all from the book “The Crash Course” by Chris Martenson. The International Energy Agency released its 2008 World Energy Outlook which gave an estimated global, collective petroleum decline rate of 6.7%. The Export Land Model, by Jeffrey Brown, can be seen at Wikipedia. The seven years to zero assumes only a five percent production decline. 2008, seven years, 2015. Which is best case, not worse. You are free to panic immediately.

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The Official Bison Web Site www.bisonpress.com

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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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