David Hughes on Canadas Oil & NG

dogf

May be lots of coal left but described as Peak as in the context it is becoming more costly to remove than the price realized in a sale based on US inventory?

May be because of labor costs it is less "peak" from 3rd world?
At least at this time?

Just an thought...

Terrapin

seahorse2 · Expert Joined: Oct 18, 2004 Posts: 1966

Mr. Hughes,

I'm glad your here. There's a thread on Canadian Natural gas, hopefully you will comment there as well.

How much NG is left in Canada?

bobbyboy · Tar Sands Joined: May 16, 2004 Posts: 75

Here's a graph I annotated a few months back based on EIA data clearly showing the 1998 coal peak that Hughes is refering to:

Strange there is no talk of this in the media nine years after the event Rolling Eyes

. Presumably the fantasy of hundreds of years worth of coal must be kept alive to the end Twisted Evil

.

Terrapin

When you look at this table you see that (US) coal prices (per short ton) peaked after the oil embargo of the 70’s and have dropped since the early 80’s until the early part of this century. They did not regain their 1998 value in real (2000) dollars until 2004. I am not convinced that the 1998 production peak is supply driven and not an artifact of the availability of cheaper imported coal.

Admittedly I am not an expert on these things, and I look foreword to hearing comments from those who know more than I do on the topic.

dhughes · Coal Joined: Jan 14, 2007 Posts: 2

As noted in my earlier post, US coal production peaked in 1998. Why? Two reasons - 1) steady declines in the Appalachian region as this is a very old mining area, with higher and higher production costs and depletion, and much of its coal is high in sulphur and therefore exceeds US Clean Air Act limits, and 2) the chockerblock transport system out of the Powder River Basin, which has reached its limits. The Powder River Basin could potentially increase production if the transportation roadblocks are eliminated - this remains to be seen. In the meantime imports from Columbia are continuing to grow.

There are two basic types of coal - coal that is suited for thermal power generation and coal that is suited for metallurgical uses. The US exports metallurgical coal and still does - this is a bread and butter issue for many producers. Importing thermal coal from Columbia, which is now up to 30 million metric tonnes per year from zero in 2002, which is required to supplant deficits in thermal coal supply for power generation. Metallurgical coal exports, which are generally much higher in price/ton than thermal coal, have continued as the US steel industry has contracted radically and the demand is not there domesically for this type of coal. Despite being accused of stating that the US is a "net importer" in a previous post I said nothing of the kind - only that after a couple of centuries of satisfying all its needs domestically, the US became an importer of thermal coal in 2003 and these imports have been growing year-after-year.

Terrapin

Thank you for your clarification and insight. I had heard that we export metallurgic coal before, but it did not come from a very reliable source.

Indeed you never used the term “net importer”. I apologize for misconstruing your intent.

SAthearn · Coal Joined: Jan 27, 2007 Posts: 1

Appreciated the well-needed discussion of the possibility that U.S. coal production has already peaked. Sorry to be late to the discussion (and to this message board).

Since this idea is still not well discussed even in Peak Oil circles, some might find the following references (which I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere) useful:

USGS researcher Robert C. Milici's paper "Production trends of major U.S. coal producing regions," http://byronw.www1host.com/files/coal.pdf. This paper is undated, but I think from 1996 or 1997. It has good discussion of several regions with production past peak or at in the peak/plateau phase, as well ones with potential for production to grow, with contrasting graphs. It explicitly references Hubbert, and includes telling comments such as that the lignite coals of Texas and North Dakota will never be used for power generation any significant distance from the mines due to their low energy content.

And here are some quotes from a compilation on Peak Oil and Energy Vulnerability I've put together:

“And then there’s the energy we all take most for granted: electricity. Over the next 20 years just meeting projected demand will require between 1300 and 1900 new power plants. That averages to more than one new power plant per week for the next 20 years.”
Vice President Dick Cheney, C-SPAN footage excerpted in the documentary Kilowatt Ours (2005), undated but probably May 2001

“Even coal has some limits. We have thousands of years, apparently, of coal. But what we don’t seem to have anymore is even tens of years of high quality, black, high-BTU, anthracite coal. And what we’re substituting it now with, is brown coal that’s so brown that it’s low sulfur, because it doesn’t have much coal in it. I’d encourage all of you to go to the New Yorker magazine in early October. They had two back-to-back articles called ‘Coal Train I’ and ‘Coal Train II,’ written by John McPhee – fabulously good articles. ‘Coal Train II’ traces you through the activities to fill up a unit-train that’s a mile-and-a-half long, in the Powder River Basin. It’s a hundred and twenty-four rail cars of nineteen thousand tons of coal. And then he rides the rails for five days to get to twenty miles outside of Macon [Georgia]. And then he describes beautifully this process of flipping the rail cars upside down and pneumatically sucking out the coal, and then the train starts back five days being empty. But nineteen thousand tons of brown coal creates eight hours of electricity. That’s low-quality coal.”
Matthew Simmons, Chairman of Simmons & Co. International energy investment bank, in lecture at the Miller Center for Public Affairs, University of Virginia, November 30, 2005 [1]

“Although coal consumption by the electric power sector increased by 1.1 percent in 2004, coal-based generation declined slightly, as increasing volumes of lower-Btu coal (subbituminous and lignite) were consumed.”
U.S. Energy Information Administration, Annual Coal Report 2004, November 2005, p. 6

“Plant Scherer burns nearly thirteen hundred coal trains a year – two thousand miles of coal cars, twelve million tons of the bedrock of Wyoming. It unloads, on average, three and a half coal trains a day. On a wall inside the plant are pictures of yellow finches, turkey vultures, and other local wildlife on Plant Scherer’s twelve thousand acres of land. Asked why Plant Scherer needs twelve thousand acres (six miles by three miles), Woodson answered readily, ‘Because we are thinking of expanding.’”
John McPhee, “Coal Train II,” New Yorker, October 10, 2005, p. 71

[1] http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/660 (link to audio); Simmons discussed McPhee’s article again in an interview on New Zealand Radio, generalizing that the scarcity of high-Btu coal now also seems to apply also to Europe and China, and adding that in the U.S. “we have a natural gas crisis, and possibly a coal crisis” pending: http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/interviews/685, dated March 26, 2006.

Steve Athearn
Rockland, ME

Quicksilver · Tar Sands Joined: Jul 30, 2005 Posts: 81

So coal's not gonna save us, natural gas isn't gonna save us, nuclear isn't gonna save us, better get those wind turbines and solar panels up real fast Laughing

_________________
He who controls the spice controls the universe.

joewp

Thanks for the interesting and scary links. There's a small error in the second Simmons interview, the comma got included in the link, breaking it. Here it is without the comma:

http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/interviews/685
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Joe P. United Political Debate
"Only when the last tree is cut; only when the last river is polluted; only when the last fish is caught; only then will they realize that you cannot eat money." - Cree Indian Proverb