Hubbert's Peak, The Coal Question, and Climate Change

Halstead wrote:
    Nov. 20, 2007
Hi,

I've written earlier about distastefully arrogant CalTech profs.'Tis pleasant to report a good one, and a good talk yesterday by David Rutledge, the Chair of the division of engineering and applied science there.  Despite a list of honors longer than my arm .. one that impressed me most, an annual award given to one person only, had been given also to six of his students .. Rutledge spoke modestly, convincingly, and well.  His title: "Hubbert's Peak, The Coal Question, and Climate Change."

Hubbert, by the way, was a geophysicist at the Shell labs who in 1956 predicted finite oil reserves with a shorter horizon to exhaustion than had before been assumed.  Hubbert's "Peak"
refers to the top of a Gaussian curve of production vs time.
Some speculation is now current that we're close to that peak, globally, for oil.  Rutledge's talk was essentially an update and extension of Hubbert's arguments, including Coal.

Firstly, the material underlying this talk, including slides,
an Excel worksheet, and a video, are available on line at
http://rutledge.caltech.edu.  This is better than any precis I may write, so I'll be brief:

Rutledge convinced me that it is probable that our oil and coal reserves are less than any of 40 scenarios considered by the most current IPCC document, and that peak global emissions of CO2 to the atmosphere will most likely occur near 2020, not 2050 or later, as has been assumed.

This assertion is dramatic, it will certainly shake up the
debate, add pressure for the development of alternative energy sources, and .. here's the 'good' news .. act to diminish the upper estimates of climate change.  The worrisome news, in my opinion, is that it will support a premature push towards nuclear power.  [I hold that we should do cheaper things first.]

Some tid-bits from the talk.

1) France has closed its last coal mine.  Germany has only 9
mines presently operating, and plans to close two more in
2009 and 2010.

2) China has ~30,000 active coal mines [!], most small and
inefficient.  It employs ~3,000,000 miners [!], most in
terrible conditions.  [The US peak mine employment was
~300,000, in 1950.  We're now at about 30,000.]  The Tan-
Shan earthquake of 27 July, 1976, killed ~30,000 miners,
trapped underground.  Pollution from burning coal presently
kills ~1,000,000 people a year in China.

3) The amount of coal removed from England and Wales is
equivalent to scraping 6" off the surface of both and
throwing the spoil into the Atlantic ocean.  Coal mining
is not presently economical in Great Britain, but done
anyway, for complex reasons.

4) The US has larger coal reserves than China. Interestingly,much of these are in Montana, which has elected    not to exploit them.  Coal provides ~50% of current US electricity demand.

Do look at the web site.  Do follow the debate that will
certainly follow this provocative study.  And do think about
the consequences of a sooner but lesser maxima for ALL the
IPCC scenarios for CO2 emissions and climate change.