COAL MAY RUN OUT SOONER RATHER THAN LATER, WIND AND SUN WON’T

Coal: Cheap and Abundant…Or is it? Why Americans Should Stop Assuming That the U.S. Has a 200-Year Supply of Coal, Leslie Glustrom’s impressive new study of U.S. coal reserves, pierces again the armor of the stubborn industry that is dying by a thousand cuts before the nation’s very eyes.

Every day news emerges of the wind power industry’s capacity to meet more of the growing U.S. demand for electricity, of the solar energy industry’s drive toward grid parity, and of the emergence of geothermal and hydrodynamic (wave, tide and current) energy industries in the wake of new policies facilitating their development by Obama administration reversals of Bush-era obstructions.

And, based on Glustrom’s report, the emergence of New Energy comes not a moment too soon as the myth of abundant, cheap coal goes up in smoke as thick and smelly as the spew from a coal-fired plant.

The myth of abundant cheap coal is based on estimates about how much coal there is in the ground but, according to Glustrom’s findings, such reserves estimates fail to differentiate between easily accessed deposits and difficult and expensive to get at coal.

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Glustrom, report author: “Americans often assert that there is a ‘200 year supply’ of coal in the United States, but the truth is almost no one has ever investigated that claim…When we began an investigation of this country’s coal supplies, we were quite shocked to find that most of the coal in the United States is buried too deeply to be accessible in large quantities or at reasonable prices…After taking a careful look at the life span of existing coal mines and the geologic, economic, legal and transportation constraints facing future expansion of these mines, we’ve come to realize that the planning horizon for moving beyond coal plants is, shockingly, much closer to 20-30 years than to 200…”

It is important to be clear that this conclusion about how much of U.S. coal reserves are economically recoverable is not Ms. Glustrom’s but that of geologists.

From the report: “The United States Geological Survey has developed a tool for assessing economic recoverability and published a series of reports showing that the amount of economically recoverable coal is a small fraction (e.g. less than 20%) of the original resource…”

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If the current financial downturn teaches anything, it teaches that a cold, hard look at the truth is healthier in the long run than believing in and living on a bubble. Glustrom’s workmanly data suggests the U.S. may once again be choosing the bubble by believing in the abundance of cheap coal and continuing to depend on it.

Glustrom: “We can’t print coal the way we’ve been printing money…so we need to take a very sober look at long-term coal supplies and begin to plan accordingly.”

The coal industry is unlikely to be frank on this subject. If economically viable coal supplies are peaking, it makes no sense to go on investing in new coal plants and pointless schemes like “clean” coal. It is obvious from the tens of millions the coal industry spends on public relations to attach the word coal to memes like "cheap and abundant" and "clean" that it wants to prevent the shift of its financial backers to New Energy sources that will never peak.

Glustrom: “While there are many options for providing electricity in the post-fossil fuel era, it appears that we need to begin planning now if we want to keep our country powered in the 2020’s and beyond…”

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The most winning argument against the New Energies from the traditional suppliers of Old Energy is that the New Energies have not yet achieved economies of scale enabling them to reach “grid parity” (where their price per kilowatt-hour is competitive with Old Energy prices). It appears that for coal, the argument is about to be turned upside down.

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In addition, Glustrom points out in the study how important it is for policy-makers to have access to the truth about coal. There is no better example of this than the clamor over research to perfect “clean” coal technology. If coal is already about to become too expensive to compete with New Energy, why in the world would anybody want to know how to apply complex technology that would make using it even more expensive?

That would be throwing research dollars down a hole (literally) instead of using them to develop better technology to utilize infinite resources like the sun, the wind and the power of flowing water.

Mass Civil Disobedience at the Coal-fired Capitol Power Plant in Washington, D.C., March 2, 2009.

From greenpeaceusa via YouTube.

Coal Supply Constraints: Long-Term American Coal Supplies Questioned
February 12, 2009 (Clean Energy Action)

WHO
Leslie Glustron, report author and member, Clean Energy Action; the U.S. coal industry; United States Geological Survey (USGS)

WHAT
Glustrom’s Coal: Cheap and Abundant…Or is it? Why Americans Should Stop Assuming That the U.S. Has a 200-Year Supply of Coal finds that economically recoverable U.S. coal reserves may not be abundant and abundant reserves will be far from cheap to mine.

WHEN
- The mythical 200-year supply of coal may be more like 20-to-30 years of economically recoverable coal.
- In 1909, USGS geologists indicated U.S. coal reserves might be constrained by early in the 21st century.
- In 1997, USGS reported it could not distinguish between those coal reserves that are economically recoverable and those that are not.
- In 2008, coal prices spiked but production did not increase proportionately, suggesting the industry was incapable of upping production.

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WHERE
- 8 nations with the biggest coal reserves: (1) United States (242.7 Billion Tonnes, 28.6% of world reserves), (2) Russian Federation (157 Billion Tonnes, 18.5%), (3) China (114.5 Billion Tonnes, 13.5%), (4) Australia (76.6 Billion Tonnes, 9.0%), (45 India (56.5 Billion Tonnes, 6.7%), (6) South Africa (48 Billion Tonnes, 5.7%), (7) Ukraine (33.8 Billion Tonnes, 4.0%), (8) Kazakhstan (31.3 Billion Tonnes, 3.7%)
- Wyoming’s coal production is approximately equal to that of the next 6 biggest coal producing states, (2) West Virginia, (3) Kentucky, (4) Pennsylvania, (5) Montana, (6) Texas and (7) Colorado.
- Clean Energy Action, a non-profit organization, is based in Boulder, CO.

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WHY
- Because coal comprises almost half of U.S. electricity generation (1.1 billion tons/year), it is vital for political, business, and environmental leaders to have an accurate assessment of future supplies.
- The Powder River Basin could be called coal’s “Fort Knox”because it produces 40% of U.S. coal but a recent USGS assessment found only 10% of the Gillette coal field, its most important, will remain economically recoverable.
- As the price of coal rose precipitously from 2002 to 2008, USGS estimates of economically recoverable coal in the Gillette field – based on improving data – fell from 23 billion tons to 10 billion tons.
- Much of the U.S. coal supply is on federal land which means there can and will be no shortcuts or cheap evasions in developing it, a consideration that has kept privately mined coal supplies cheaper.
- Increasing coal prices mean increasing coal production prices.
- As costs of land reclamation grow, the cost of coal (and coal-fired electricity) will grow.
- Clean Energy Action missions: (1) Educate the public and energy policy decision makers about the liabilities of coal dependence in a climate changing world and (2) advocate for the phase-out of coal-fired power in favor of Energy Efficiency and New Energies (esp., solar power plants, wind installations and distributed generation combined with smart grid and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology.

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QUOTES
- From the Glustrom report: “The U.S. Energy Information Administration has repeatedly published data on coal “reserves” as though they include an assessment of economic recoverability when in actuality they did not. As a result, the often touted “200 year supply of U.S. coal” is not based on a realistic assessment of how much coal will actually be accessible.”
- From the Glustrom report: "It is not clear who first referred to the United States as the 'Saudi Arabia of Coal,' but like other notable “facts,” it seems to have been repeated so often that it is often taken for granted. From Time magazine and the Christian Science Monitor, to endless blog entries and statements of a Presidential candidate,3 the belief in an almost endless supply of coal seems to have become part of the “conventional wisdom” in the United States…Yet a closer look indicates that, like some other pieces of conventional wisdom that have often been repeated, this one does not bear up under closer scrutiny. The truth is that most of the coal in the United States is buried too deep to be accessible in large quantities. Importantly, coal is a solid, not a liquid or a gas, so its extraction is, in many ways, more difficult than that of oil or natural gas…”