Blackout: Dwindling Coal Reserves and the Siren Song of "Clean Coal"
There isn’t nearly as much coal left as most people think. “Clean coal” will run down limited reserves even faster. If humanity doesn’t begin massive, sustained investment in renewable power sources immediately, civilization could be at risk before the end of the century. And that’s without considering the impacts of climate change.
Such is the stark conclusion of Richard Heinberg’s Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis, which despite its dry tone and technical complexity is one of the scariest f*cking books I’ve ever read.
Right now the U.S. is on the verge of a momentous gamble, as reflected in the ACES bill: betting that long-term emission reductions can be achieved via carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). ACES postpones serious domestic reductions for over a decade on the assumption (hope?) that CCS technology will mature and drop in price enough to enable the indefinite use of coal.
Similarly, at U.N. talks it is fervently hoped that CCS will enable coal to continue driving developing-world economic expansion (as oil declines, coal use has risen). Nothing approaching WWII-scale investment in renewables and efficiency is on the table.
It’s a game-theoretic exercise played for Dantean stakes. If Heinberg is right, policymakers are operating under two fateful, and possibly fatal, illusions.
First, they think the U.S. has a “250-year supply” of coal, and that China, Russia, Australia, and India have similarly inexhaustible supplies. They’re almost certainly wrong.
The bulk of Heinberg’s book is a methodical walk through several recent studies on coal reserves. (One of the most shocking facts about coal reserves is how little we know about them—they were scarcely studied in any systematic way before 2005.) If you have time for just one, check out “Coal: Resources and Future Production” [PDF], by Germany’s Energy Watch Group. It’s a page-turner!
A key feature of recent studies is that they abandon the conventional but misleading expression of coal supplies: reserves-to-production ratio, or R/P. Divide total reserves (how much is in the ground) by the current rate of production (how much we’re using) and voilà, a big number—a 250-year supply, even.
But rates of fossil-fuel production are not, indeed cannot physically be, static. The easiest reserves are found first. Over time, as more accessible seams are mined out, what remains is increasingly difficult to obtain and expensive to transport. In every coal field, every country, every region, the energy-return-on-investment (EROI) rises, peaks, and declines. Post-peak, it takes more and more energy to reach the coal and get it where it needs to go. The crucial issue is not how much coal is left in the ground but where we are on the curve, and more to the point, when we cross into negative EROI, the crucial line after which it takes more work to get coal out of the ground than coal returns in energy.
Obviously that line is a moving target. It depends on commodity prices, technology, the cost of transport, and any number of other dynamic variables. Nonetheless, it’s possible to sketch a basic bell curve for EROI (a “Hubbert linearization,” in dorkspeak) for coal production. That’s what the Energy Watch Group (EWG) and others have recently done, and as it turns out, the news ain’t pretty.
(This will all sound very, very familiar to the peak-oil crowd. Turns out coal is a finite fossil fuel too!)
According to the EWG, global coal production will, best-case scenario, peak and begin declining about 20 years from now. Yikes.
The second fateful illusion: that carbon capture and sequestration can enable the continued expansion of coal use.
Industry insiders admit that CCS technology will not be developed, and costs reduced enough to prompt widespread adoption, until 2035 at best. By then, if CCS becomes a primary climate strategy and EWG-style analysis is correct, humanity will be in the grips of four interrelated costs and risks associated with coal. Quoting Heinberg:
• the need for substantial investment in new CCS technology;
• higher coal prices and shortages due to depletion;
• higher electricity generating costs due to the use of IGCC and CCS; and
• lower electricity generation efficiencies due to the use of CCS, requiring more coal to produce an equivalent amount of electricity.
So at a time when supplies are declining, while commodity and transportation costs are rising, we’ll need much more coal to get the same amount of electricity from a more expensive generation technology. Surely you see the wisdom of the strategy.
Another issue that doesn’t get the press it deserves is the investment necessary to produce the infrastructure for widespread CCS. It’s mind-boggling. Ultimately humanity would be burying more than twice the amount of CO2 that it digs up in coal, more than eight times the amount of yearly volume handled by the global crude oil industry (according to Vaclav Smil). Building the new-gen plants, running more railroad cars to bring the increased coal supplies necessary to run them, building and burying all the CO2 pipelines, maintaining CO2 burial fields ... it all requires not only an enormous amount of money but an enormous investment of energy, and fossil energy is a finite commodity.
Heinberg’s conclusion: it’s renewables or nothing.
Imagine the remaining reserves of oil and coal as a savings account. There’s a lot in the bank, but pretty soon income is going to decline and savings are going to get drawn down. The question before us is: how fast should we draw down our fossil savings, and what should we spend them on?
Spending on CCS poses a fateful opportunity cost. If scaling up renewables and efficiency (R&E) is difficult today, it will be doubly so when savings have been drained pursuing CCS infrastructure. According to the scenarios developed by Heinberg and the Post Carbon Institute, massive CCS investment would at best delay an energy crash by a decade or two. I’m dubious of these kinds of scenario exercises, but it’s inarguable that after all that fossil energy is spent on CCS, it can’t be retrieved. There’s no do-over. If it doesn’t work out, the energy needed to build out R&E infrastructure will only be more expensive.
One subject on which Heinberg strikes me as unduly pessimistic is the potential for R&E. He and the Post Carbon Institute think the best-case scenario is a massive, controlled, humane reduction in human population alongside a transition to a much lower-energy, localized form of life. For my part, I incline bright green. Worldchanging‘s Alex Steffen put it well in a recent tweet: “To be bright green is to know that a sane respect for planetary limits imposes no meaningful limits on humanity’s potential, at all.” It is possible to flourish sustainably.
But that’s an argument for another time. At minimum, a sustainable future requires the best possible understanding of available coal reserves and their likely cost. If “clean coal” turns out to be a phantom, chasing it will not only waste time, it may foreclose the only decent options we have left.
Follow David Roberts on Twitter: www.twitter.com/drgrist
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I prefer to use Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) over EROI because it takes the economics out of it, which people use to make all kinds of sophistic arguments. The net energy of extracting increasingly lower quality and more and remote coal, together with the energy required to capture and transport the CO2, very quickly gets into marginal returns.
Another factor that reveal the folly of fossil fule reliance is the cost of finding new "reserves." It gets increasingly expensive to find ever more remote and rarer coal and oil, so the exploration cost increases exponentially per unit of proven reserve added to the national or global stock of energy. In contrast, the cost of adding "reserves" of renewable energy is essentially zero. The sun shines; the wind blows; the tides roll; the earth's geothermal gradient is a constant.
If your claims are truthful, it is an inescapable conclusion that economic conditions will, at some future date, make wind, solar and other green energy sources cost competitive with fossil fuels.
This begs the question: Why does Team Obama think it is necessary to regulate or prohibit energy production from fossil fuels if economics will do this anyway???
Oh I don't know. Could it have something to do with the fact that if we don't act to cut carbon emissions within the next 2 years we risk triggering self-amplifying feed backs such as methane releases from melting permafrost and calthrates that guarantee cataclysmic and irreversible climate change capable of wiping out 70% of all species and cutting global economic growth by 20% by 2040?
Yes, now that I think about it, I'm sure that's why.
Peak Oil and now this. We're in bad shape. Really makes other issues like health care and financial reform seem almost trivial. This stuff about Peak Oil and now coal should be headline news. Bill Maher is right. We are stupid.
First..and this really ticks me off..I wanted to read your entire piece..yet this HUGE picture of the book blocked it..I tried clicking to close..and was IMMEDIATELY directed to a site to BUY it...this is really cheap...and offensive and blocks half your first few paragraphs
Yes..clean coal...we boomers would say 'fighting for peace is like..f.....king for virginity"...ain't gonna happen...We spoilt amerikans now want the REST of the world to forego coal...cause "we bad"...we became great on fossil er.do.but...er.do as we say..not as we do ...heck..were I China or India...I'd have to stifle a chuckle..How cannot the entire COACHELLA Valley of California be 100% solar powered (yup..they've got some windmills...poor migrating birds)....my cousin lives in an upscale "development"...solar panels are UNSIGHTLY.. someone explain this to me why can't solar panels be considered "pretty"..or at least vanilla..neither here nor there... I want solar more than wind (again..bird migration)...now..the Chinese ARE ahead of US(A) on this...so, guess we'll buy THEIR technology while still buying Saudi Oil..
NEW housing complexes cannot be built with wood roofing..HAS to be tile, fires.now it's accepted...The clock is ticking .so Leo and Brangelina (they DO a lot)...need to make it so COOL...forsolar panels EVERYWHERE...Dayglow, Peter Max art...Picasso...make 'em fun...
but first..get that "ad" off your post...thanks.
You know, not everywhere gets sunshine like CA. In fact, many states get little sunshine during the winter months. Solar alone is not the answer. I think solar and wind "only" will bring about the very depopulation that is mentioned in the article, which is a bad thing. In order to grow wealth in any civilization, you need cheap, intensive, energy sources. I kept looking for a mention of nuclear energy and was disappointed that it was excluded. Nuclear provides intensive, relatively cheap, emissionless energy. We have had the technology for Fast Breeder Reactors since the 70's, reactors which are bullet proof, can't melt down, and reuse the spent waste. This is where we should be concentrating a least a substantial part of our energy investment dollars. Unfortunately, the US has no energy plan whatsoever It's pathetic.
True, but the energy can be piped through a national grid. You can have solar panel farms throughout death valey and the desertous regions in our west, and windfarms in the midwest, and hydrofarms along the coasts and in the rivers, and the areas of the country that aren't covered by these methods can have the energy piped in from the parts that do.
Though there are concerns with even the renewable methods (ALL of them). With the inefficiencies of solar power, you'd need a massive amount of land to make a significant dent in the nation's need for power. Wind farms, potentially dry out the soil and change climate patterns, and hydrofarms potentially change currents, and may damage sea life. But at least all of it is renewable. And just because solar power isn't where it needs to be doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile. ALL of these methods should receive alot of investment money so we can iron out the kinks before its too late.
Just ask T. Boone Pickens!
High school chemistry will show you that clean coal is very improbable.
1atom of carbon (weight 12)
combines by burning with
2 atoms of oxygen (weight 2 X 16 = 32)
to produce 1 molecule of CO2 (weight 44)
So you start with 12 tons of carbon and end up with 44 tons of CO2. That is a 366% increase in mass right there. Plus CO2 is a gas under most conditions and certainly when it is rising up a smoke stack.
There is a limit to how much you can compress CO2. It turns into a solid, dry ice. Even then it is a little less dense than carbon, which means it occupies at a minimum 4x as much space as the original carbon.
You have to use energy to compress and transport it. I want to see proof that you can gain more energy in the combustion phase than you waste in the sequestration and storage.
There is nothing dirty about CO2. Claiming it is a pollutant is the same as claiming O2 or H2O are pollutants.
CO2 is not dirty, but too much of it in the atmosphere causes temperature changes which can be devastating.
The bummer is that the peak oil/NG/coal is happening just a few decades from when it could motivate action against climate change. Early and large action is required on avoiding carbon - as long as it is cheap to extract we won't reduce usage. Governments are to weak to act for the good of the populace and or the world.
Tom
clean coal does not exist.
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