Earth Equity News

Has the World's Peak-Coal Moment Arrived? By Patrick Reis, Greenwire, 9/29/10. "Is the world about to begin running out of coal? Two researchers say so. In a peer-reviewed article published in the journal Energy, they write that the world will hit 'peak coal' production next year or shortly thereafter, and then mining would begin a long, steep decline. Bottom line, say the paper's co-authors, Tadeusz Patzek, a University of Texas engineering professor, and Greg Croft, a St. Mary's College of California earth science professor, is that the 7 billion tons of coal the world is now mining and burning each year is about the best it can do. The pair's prediction is based on the 'Hubbert Cycle,' the resource-depletion theory that American geophysicist M. King Hubbert used in the 1950s to correctly forecast that U.S. oil production would peak two decades later. Patzek predicts coal will peak not because supplies are running out but because the remaining deposits are increasingly difficult to mine. Alaska's North Slope, for example, has coal reserves that rival those of the continental United States, but turning that coal into energy would be practically impossible, Patzek argues."