And they have a fast train.

What we want is a NO FOOTPRINT ENERGY source

Is that too simple.

There are well proven ways to achieve this
but hey the fossil sellers are not interested
and you the people, just have no idea.

Too bad, keep ya dry'n weather, good for dry'n wet clothes, hey don't let it rain on parade day

and keep pumping that mercury into ya neurones..... life is a circus, yeah !

LOL, more like an insane asylum

Most climate scientists nowadays are worried that there remains too much coal that could be exploited, not that there isn't enough.

I have not yet seen the German study to which you refer, but I am surprised by its findings. Production might well peak because of market forces and environmental regulations, but the world is not "running out" of coal that can be mined at costs comparable to the cost of producing petroleum. I should add that my previous statement holds for the world in general but not for Germany, or at least not for hard-coal found in Germany, which became grossly uneconomic to mine several decades ago.

That said, coal resource and "reserve" estimates are nowhere near as rigorously compiled as are estimates for petroleum reserves. (This is a subject I researched in depth years ago. Unfortunately the report, No. 2 in this listing is not available in electronic form.)

I put the word reserve between quotes because the criteria used for delineating reserves of coal (more properly the "reserve base") are usually physical -- seam depth and thickness -- rather than economic. Moreover, the criteria are not standard across countries. Thus Australia requires thicker minimum seam-thickness and shallower maximum depth limits for a coal deposit to be counted as a reserve than the United States, which understates the amount of coal underlying Australia compared with what has been claimed for the United States.

In short, worry about the amount of carbon that will be released into the atmosphere if the world turns to producing liquid fuels from coal, but not about a future shortage of the black stuff -- that is, of course, if you are willing to put up with tearing up a lot more of the earth's surface to get at it.

These are only my personal opinions.

Fuel            %
Oil            38
Natural Gas    14
Coal            5
Nuclear        31
Hydro          14
Biofuels/wood   5
Total         100

Ped Shed Blog

If it's wrong -- if there's plenty of coal waiting to be burnt -- then we're back to pleading with an energy-hungry world to refrain from burning it based on concerns about the atmosphere -- concerns that, you may have noticed, have not done much yet to constrain its use.

If the report is right, then our hand is immeasurably strengthened. In addition to all the climate-change arguments, we can then say, "coal will be prohibitively expensive in a few decades, so we have no choice but to move to R&E." For better or worse, that brute economic argument is one everyone understands and responds to.

One way or another, if it turns out peak coal is imminent, the energy landscape fundamentally changes. You should check out the linked Heinberg piece.

grist.org

I guess at the end of the day, "peak anything" is not a scientific term because it is a matter of economics and perception, translating feelings into words and numbers.  I know the fight, the battle, and the odds -- if there is plenty of fossil fuels why change our habits and life styles one bit?  That's what we want, new habits, new technology, and new life styles, right?  I completely understand.

I an sure the German study about coal consumption and reserves will be enlightening, since if they are responsible scientists they will know what kind of coal, where it is, how difficult it is to extract it, and what kind of assessments have been done in different locations using different methods. One might find an unequal distribution of things that makes a top-down argument for "peak coal" quite complex.  It is like Global Warming where some areas get too much rain and others none, some too hot and other too cold.  

So I hope you're cool with my argument, that the devil is in the details.  
/sammie

Onward through the fog

He's even got a spiffy little scenario role-playing game set up where a number of events lead to rapid constriction in oil supplies and participants (college students and a himself) play the US cabinet trying to advise the president about what to do.  He posit unrest in Nigeria, terrorists hitting Alaskan oil refineries, and Middle East unrest--the situation soon spins out of control.  That part's pretty good--we ARE astoundingly vulnerable.

However, when I attended one of the shows, I learned to my dismay that his solution is ethanol and coal-to-liquids, just like Bob Hirsch of SAIC.   In other words, the only problem is a liquid fuels shortage, so the solution to getting back to the happy place is "make more liquid fuels."

Apparently leadership in America has devolved to the point where the first to suggest treating a symptom in isolation is considered an innovative leader, and anyone who actually suggests considering and addressing the root cause (a society built to require automobility) without ignoring the other related problems (global heating, public health, weakened financial system) is just talking crazy.

The 5% Project

Total energy consumption in France, 2000:

Fuel            Percent
Oil               38
Natural Gas       14
Coal               5
Nuclear           31
Hydro              6
Others             5
Total            100

Figures do not add up 100 because of rounding.
Source: Bilan énergétique provisoire de la France en 2000, p. 20

Ped Shed Blog

As oil and natural gas peak, decline, and become prohibitively expensive, there's going to be massive pressure to use coal to make up the gap (and keep up with rising demand). I repeat: massive. You really think the U.S. and China are going to leave the coal in the ground out of fear of sea-level rises a century hence? Perhaps you have more faith in human rationality than I do.

grist.org

Much of what I see being written about the Energy Watch Group study I was saying 20 years ago. To wit: that the officially reported estimates of coal resources and reserves (the more accurate terms would be endowment and resource base) have not been prepared as prudently as those for hydrocarbons and uranium, and therefore should not be compared with the estimates of reserves for those fuels. Moreover, there are major differences among countries in the minimum density of observations and physical criteria (depth, thickness, angle of the coal seams) used to decide whether a given deposit should be included in the reserve base. And many countries do not adequately take into account changing land-use patterns and prohibitions (e.g., the creation of wildlife preserves), which can render particular deposits inaccessible.

I was pointing out also that the reserve numbers for most western European countries vastly exaggerated what could be exploited economically. For example, into the 1990s, the World Energy Council (and hence BP also) were still reporting significant "reserves" of coal for the Netherlands, even though that country closed down its last coal mine in 1976, and the remaining unexploited seams are deep and flooded.

The estimates for the United States also probably over-state its true reserve position, though that still leaves a significant amount that can be exploited.

On the other hand, Australia, and to a lesser extent Canada, are sitting on enormous coal endowments. During the coal "boom" of the early 1980s (before oil prices collapsed), there were even exploration teams working in Greenland. Since then, large new surface mines have been built in Colombia and Indonesia. (Zimbabwe also has coal, but for obvious reasons no one is doing much with it at the moment.)

The devil, as Sam rightly observes, lies in the details. Were the U.S. Government to ban mountain-top removal as a legitimate mining method, and Germany were to make it more costly to compensate villages displaced by its voracious brown-coal open-pit operations, there would be less coal that could be produced at a given cost.

However, what could change the equation is underground (in situ) gasification of coal seams, techniques for which have advanced considerably since the 1980s. As prices of natural gas rise, and subsidies for "alternative fuels" increase, a lot more of formerly expensive coal will start to look interesting to investors.

I do agree with you, David, that "if there's plenty of coal waiting to be burnt, then we're back to pleading with an energy-hungry world to refrain from burning it based on concerns about the atmosphere ... [but] if it turns out peak coal is imminent, the energy landscape fundamentally changes."

Alas, in my personal opinion, the truth is probably closer to the first of the two alternative scenarios you posit.

These are only my personal opinions.

Thanks for your expertise and perspective, Ron.

grist.org

humanity will have to adjust to a sharply energy constrained world.

Why would humanity not simply use uranium for energy?
nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/UraniuamDistribution

is exactly half.  Wind will soons push that #

And that % can easily shift in a crunch. Most trips can be made without oil; trams, subways, TGV, bicycling, walking are ready options for a majority of trips.  Taking a car is often easier, but in a crunch they have a largely built out (some still under construction) non-oil transportation alternative readily available.

Their not very good freight rail system (just opened to competition) can take some freight off of trucks.

No one is perfect, but France seems to be near the head of the pack of where we should all be going.

http://www.lightrailnow.org/features/f_lrt_2006-05a.htm

Peak coal is a long way into the future for the US.  Like talk about peak oil, I expect little more than empty talk about peak coal, no real policy changes, and insignificant alternative energy investments until coal shortages (or carbon taxes) cause permanent price increases.  

It is encouraging that China's coal economy is not sustainable.

Look the problem is not that we don't have non-fossil fuel alternatives.

Jacobson & Archer have estimate that wind energy has a worldwide commercial potential of 72 Terrawatts. These are class 3 sites on land, not including offshore potential. Granted that this is still a second cut: there are probably real obstacles on many of these sites. But overall there is little doubt that wind alone could provide all the world's energy. It would require some big ass HVDC lines. Pumped storage to smooth out variability would cover substantially fewer acres than current world dams.

Similarly a fraction of the worlds deserts could provide many times the energy wind could via solar thermal electricity.

So we have plenty of renewable energy - all you want.

Lots of near term potential for breakthroughs too. Tester and MIT seem to think that we have near term breakthroughs in dry rock geothermal that could move potential from a fraction of a percent of world consumption to close to all of world consumption.

Ocean currents have tremendous potential - basically  underwater windmills.

Both of these currently face obstacles - unlike sun and wind, they are not quite ready for prime time. But they are close.

So we face no shortage of usable energy. What we may face a shortage of is cheap energy. Which is where the URGE2 thing comes in. If energy prices have to rise slightly, use that energy more efficiently and your economy not only does not suffer; it improves.

S

wind energy has a worldwide commercial potential of 72 Terrawatts. [...] there is little doubt that wind alone could provide all the world's energy. [...] we have plenty of renewable energy - all you want.

World civilization currently runs on 16 terawatts. The power of the sunlight reaching the surface of the earth (the surface solar constant) is 120,000 terawatts. If civilization's power-consumption grows at 3.041% per year (20-fold per century), and if practical-solar is limited to about 0.5% of the above 120,000 terawatts, civilization's power needs will outstrip the potential of the surface solar constant in less than two centuries. (0.5% of 120,000 terawatts is 600 terawatts; and 20^2 * 16 terawatts = 6,400 terawatts of civilization power draw, two centuries from now.) Solar power (as wind, wave, ocean current, etc.) is therefore inherently unsustainable.

Nuclear fission, on the other hand, can draw upon a small percentage of the 40 trillion tons of uranium in the earth's crust until it extracts a total of half a trillion tons, three centuries from now, when civilization will be using energy at 8,000 times the rate that it is today. That would be without breeder-reactors or any kind of fuel-reprocessing. Adding breeder-reactors at that point, and a small percentage of the 160 trillion tons of thorium in the crust, would allow us to last until five centuries from now, when civilization will be using energy at 3.2 million times the rate that it is today.

At that point, civilization would have a practical need to switch to another source of fuel. Fusion using deuterium and lithium seems likely.

And that does not even begin to look at near term potential breakthroughs - Flyng Energy Generators that have a potential of more like 350 terawatts from wind than 72 terawatts. Geothermal technolgies that could raise geothermal technology from current less than a terawatt (a lot less) to 60 terawatts.

And if that is not enough hey, just because nukes are overpriced and proliferation prone today that does not mean they will always be. IF efficiency and renewables buy us only a few centuries, that will be plenty of time to develop nukes that really can do what the nuclear industry has always promised, but never delivered. Heck, in that time, maybe will get net energy sustained fusion.

If the people of 2507 find it advantageous to use all these radiators*, they will certainly have no option but to distribute them, at least, through a spherical region whose diameter will be 16 million km, 1,250 times Earth's, and it will be that small only if they crowd it so thickly that it becomes completely opaque.

It would be more reasonable to distribute them through a sun-enclosing shell whose inner and outer surface radii are respectively near those of the Earth's and Mars' orbits. From Jupiter they will be an invisibly thin fog; the sun out there will seem as bright as ever. That's true even if the power they use starts as focused sunlight, so  Lipow's assertion in re renewable energy is correct out to 500 years, although he mentions nonrenewables (geothermal) and asserts tremendous potential for renewables that do not in fact have it (seawater turbines). For 20-fold increase per century using focused sunlight, the sun does start to get noticeably fog-darkened, as seen from Jupiter, 925 years from now, and, of course, completely hidden after 1,000 to 1,050 years.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes

* "Salary" once had something to do with being paid in salt, I'm told. If that's true, Romans noticing a good year with increasing salaries might have projected that we, in this era, would consume millions of solar masses per day of salt, each. Simple geometric projections of the next thousand years' power consumption may make more sense, then again, they may not.

And if that is not enough hey, just because nukes are overpriced [...] today that does not mean they will always be. IF efficiency and renewables buy us only a few centuries, that will be plenty of time to develop nukes that really can do what the nuclear industry has always promised, but never delivered.

nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/OneCompletePage#Operating_Costs

Companies that operate the USA's nuclear power reactors have made excellent profits over the last five years. The US Nuclear Power industry has at last lived up to its promise made in in 1970's to produce electricity reliably and cheaply. Since 1987 the cost of producing electricity from [nuclear] has decreased from 3.63 cents per KW-Hr to 1.68 cents per KW-Hour in 2004 and plant availability has increased from 67% to over 90%.

world-nuclear.org/info/inf104.html

Economics

Increasing fossil fuel prices have greatly improved the economics of nuclear power for electricity now. Several studies show that nuclear energy is the most cost-effective of the available base-load technologies. In addition, as carbon emission reductions are encouraged through various forms of government incentives and trading schemes, the economic benefits of nuclear power will increase further.

Insurance against future price exposure

A longer-term advantage of uranium over fossil fuels is the low impact that increased fuel prices will have on the final electricity production costs, since a large proportion of those costs is in the capital cost of the plant. This insensitivity to fuel price fluctuations offers a way to stabilize power prices in deregulated markets.

These numbers on coal are equally suspect. Different standards for different countries, etc, etc. The other thing people often forget is the investment required to get the oil in your gas tank. It's one thing pumping easy oil out of the ground but once you start talking about oil sands or coal liquification you need big, big plants to do that. Building these takes years and costs billions. Before these things are on stream takes a while.

But thanks to creativity and inovation, that won't necessarily mean a lower standard of living.  At least for those who take the renewable energy and conservation path.

It will mean prosperity for those who provide the devices that make this possible.  

Would you rather live in prosperity or under oily corporate dictatorship?

Next election.  Vote HUMAN!  Instead of shaved ape.  

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Building these takes years and costs billions. Before these things are on stream takes a while.

Hence there is opportunity for futures traders to warn us by softening the price curves. Do you have any suggestions for encouraging them to take advantage of these money-making opportunities?

MUST BE BANNED.... Nuclear material must stay where it lies. Finish Fission.

No ENERGY FOOTPRINT now or later, artihmetic projections might just be correct for salt you may find.

50 trillion terawatts ... can't be disposed of after use except with radiators whose surface area adds up to many times that of the Earth.

I believe that would be 50 million terawatts, five centuries from now (3.2 million * 16 terawatts) -- but the (heat-limited growth) point sounds valid. In fact, Dez Akin has been making the same point recently at The Oil Drum. I think that heat build-up would apply pressure to Earth-based enterprise to move off-planet. Therefore, exponential civilization energy growth might still happen, but it would not be restricted to Earth. Fission fuel resources would therefore necessarily last a lot longer (as Dez Akin has been saying) than a mere few centuries -- unless escaping enterprise decides to take much of the Earth's fission-fuel with it.

I think there would also be pressure to take planet-wide collective action to address the heat build-up. It might be sensible at that time to virtually-completely remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Google says, "Without CO2 in the air, the temperature would be a chilly minus 18 degrees C." These competing forces might result in an average Earth-temperature closer to 40 degrees celsius (104F), than to today's 15 degrees celsius. Planet-orbiting enterprise equipped with solar-power collectors might block much of the sunlight that would otherwise be intercepted by the earth.

So, I think more terrestrial-enterprise growth -- than Dez Akin has been envisioning -- is possible. But my vision of the possibility of five centuries (and beyond) of continuous 20-fold-per-century growth in energy-consumption seems wrong now. Four centuries might be near the limit (reaching 2.56 million terawatts, which is 15-times the solar constant of 174,000 terawatts).

Coal as a source of gas or synthetic oil or just as itself does not come easily out of the ground. It is like the oil sands in Canada. People like to point out that there is plenty of oil there. True, the problem is the billions and billions of investment required and the tens of thousands of skilled workers to get it out.

We can do it, but it takes time. Energy demand is growing much faster than we can bring these alternative fossil fuel sources online. It takes ten years or so to bring a standard oil field into production...

You described a square-wave event. Square-wave events are damaging events. They damage because they are hard acceleration curves. As you say, "It takes time" to respond. The service that futures traders provide to an economy is the softening of square-wave events. That means that futures trading causes future price-shocks to be spread out over time.

As you say, "Energy demand is growing much faster than we can" respond. Anticipation of future price shocks causes present prices to rise, lessening demand and steeling an economy for scarcity.

Here is the Wikipedia page on supply and demand:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand

As I said, "Do you have any suggestions for encouraging [futures traders] to take advantage of these money-making opportunities?"

The rich getting richer and the poor starving.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Thank you for pointing that out. I know that I already answered your comment, but I recently had some new insights that I would like to add to this old thread:

Heat radiant-flux of a given body, at a given mean thermal-pressure, is lowest when that thermal-pressure is distributed evenly. Making the thermal-pressure distribution uneven, even in the slightest amount, raises radiant flux. To make thermal-pressure very very uneven, it is helpful to employ heat pumps and parabolic* reflectors (aimed at the 20-30 Kelvin starry background). Discussion on the latter can be found here:
halfbakery.com/idea/Cosmic_20Background_20Refrigeration?op=aye

Deep parabolic reflectors:
solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/Parabolic_reflectors#Deep_parabolas

Diamond might make a good material out of which to make the pressure vessels that would sit at the parabolic focal-points.
google.com/search?q=diamond+%22melting+point%22

Images like these might become common sights:
static.flickr.com/3/6056981_cef36e42e8_m.jpg
chessbase.com/news/2006/almira24.jpg
2modern.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/uslvlux.jpg



The fact that each reflective-parabola is also a rocket nozzle, that -- even when merely employed as a heat-dumper -- accelerates the body it happens to be attached-to, is another issue.

* complex-parabolic, actually, since a real-life radiator could not be a pure point.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
How motoring gains nuclear cachet

1. Renewables
   
2. Nuclear

So it's really a matter of which path offers the most Sustainable future.

-David Ahlport

I believe heavily in Murphey's Law.

-David Ahlport

Yes.
.

GRLCowan wrote: What is the paraboloid doing that a simple sunshade would not?

The paraboloidal-reflector is limiting the heating of the environment immediately around the radiator, limiting the greenhouse-effect photonic-backscatter heating of the general earth-biosphere, limiting the photonic backscatter from the general particle-cloud of the solar-system, and increasing the photonic leverage over that of the starry night. With this set-up, only a radial tiny bit of the starry-night can see our radiator, and vice-versa.

The first major problem is getting the heat of the biosphere out of the earth's atmosphere. (A miles-tall, evacuated-and-diamond-capped reflector might help; or perhaps locating the heatpump-radiator-reflector assembly on a mountain.) After that, it is still helpful to use a tight beam in order to 1) avoid having photons absorbed or reflected-back by solar-system flotsam-and-jetsam (including planets, moons, asteroids,  rocks, dust, cosmic particle-rays, hydrogen, etc.), and 2) increase lever-advantage over that of the galactic or cosmic background.

I suspect that shading from the sun (the source of a mere 1,000 W/m2 of photonic-pressure) would be irrelevant to the photonic-pressure produced by our 3,000 degree-kelvin radiator. Or perhaps when you said "sunshade" you meant to refer-to our radiator as a little synthetic-sun that the surrounding environment would need to be shaded from (in order to achieve the goal of pressure-diversity).
.

In a nutshell, we want 1) to maximize photonic-pressure diversity in the earth's biosphere, and 2) our pressure-outlet to see as little back-pressure and backsplash as possible.
google.com/search?q=%22back+pressure%22

Back pressure - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Back Pressure in the exhaust sense of the term, is usually termed as being a "bad thing" for performance

"A Physicist's View of the World's Energy Situation"

Well, not just any physicist. Dr Steven Koonin, who was appointed BP's Chief Scientist last year, appeared at a recent public Colloquium at Fermilab to discuss some of the technical, economic, and social considerations surrounding the challenge of ensuring adequate energy supplies in an environmentally acceptable manner.

It is all about the interrelated issues of "peak" energies and global warming.  Enjoy.