Tim De Chant wrote:Governments and organizations around the world may be significantly overestimating just how much coal is available, the new study says. Such fallacious reporting is nothing new—the United States government happily overestimated oil reserves in the 1950s and 1960s until peak oil hit the lower 48. David Rutledge, professor of engineering and applied sciences at the California Institute of Technology, claims the same mistakes are being repeated with coal. His results, reported in a panel discussion at this year’s American Geophysical Union meeting, state the world only has 662 billion tons of coal, including reserves already exploited. The estimate is well short of the 1,027 billion tons remaining in proven and projected reserves, according to the World Energy Council.
This new lower number, Rutledge says, also means fewer fossil fuels to burn and less carbon dioxide to pump into the atmosphere. The net result? He predicts atmospheric carbon dioxide will peak at 460 parts per million before 2100, nearly 100ppm lower than the best-case scenario put forth by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The slide show of the talk by David Rutledge, Hubbert's Peak, The Coal Question, and Climate Change is available on his web site and it contains the following graphics on UK coal production.
And also, what I found to be the most interesting aspect of this article (peak coal is old news), he makes reference to William Stanley Jevons who wrote a book on Peak Coal in 1865 called The Coal Question which contained this projection of UK coal production:
Jevons was basically writing about UK Peak Coal in 1865!
When I find time I'll try to read his book...
