Пик угля
Согласно новым оценкам мировые запасы доступного для добычи угля составляют всего-лишь небольшую долю от того, что ранее рассматривалось как запасы угля.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/world-coal-rese.html
World Coal Reserves Could Be a Fraction of Previous Estimates
SAN FRANCISCO - A new calculation of the world's coal reserves is much lower than previous estimates.
..
The new model, created by Dave Rutledge, chair of Caltech's engineering and applied sciences division, suggests that humans will only pull up a total - including all past mining - of 662 billion tons of coal out of the Earth. The best previous estimate, from the World Energy Council, says that the world has almost 850 billion tons of coal still left to be mined.
"Every estimate of the ultimate coal resource has been larger," said ecologist Ken Caldeira of Stanford University, who was not involved with the new study.
...
Rutledge argues that governments are terrible at estimating their own fossil fuel reserves. He developed his new model by looking back at historical examples of fossil fuel exhaustion. For example, British coal production fell precipitously form its 1913 peak. American oil production famously peaked in 1970, as controversially predicted by King Hubbert. Both countries had heartily overestimated their reserves.
It was from manipulating the data from the previous peaks that Rutledge developed his new model, based on fitting curves to the cumulative production of a region. He says that they provide much more stable estimates than other techniques and are much more accurate than those made by individual countries.
"The record of geological estimates made by governments for their fossil fuel estimates is really horrible," Rutledge said during a press conference at the American Geological Union annual meeting. "And the estimates tend to be quite high. They over-predict future coal production."
More specifically, Rutledge says that big surveys of natural resources underestimate the difficulty and expense of getting to the coal reserves of the world. And that's assuming that the countries have at least tried to offer a real estimate to the international community. China, for example, has only submitted two estimates of its coal reserves to the World Energy Council - and they were wildly different.
"The Chinese are interested in producing coal, not figuring out how much they have," Rutledge said. "That much is obvious."
The National Research Council's Committee on Coal Research, Technology, and Resource Assessments to Inform Energy Policy actually agrees with many of Rutledge's criticisms, while continuing to maintain far sunnier estimates of the recoverable stocks of American coal.
"Present estimates of coal reserves are based upon methods that have not been reviewed or revised since their inception in 1974, and much of the input data were compiled in the early 1970’s," the committee wrote in a 2007 report. "Recent programs to assess reserves in limited areas using updated methods indicate that only a small fraction of previously estimated reserves are actually mineable reserves.”
And don't look to technology to bail out coal miners. Mechanization has actually decreased the world's recoverable reserves, because huge mining machines aren't quite as good at digging out coal as human beings are.
Также смотрите более старый отчёт Peak Coal - Coming Soon?, согласно которому если оценивать добычу угля не в тоннах, а в выделяющейся при сжигании этих тонн тепловой энергии (разные типы угля имеют сильно разную калорийность, и первыми добывают наиболее калорийные угли) то получается что пик добычи угля в США был пройден в 1998 году, а в масштабах всего мира пик угледобычи придётся приблизительно на 2025 год.
Ну и на закуску: Black Gold: Return of the King
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/world-coal-rese.html
World Coal Reserves Could Be a Fraction of Previous Estimates
SAN FRANCISCO - A new calculation of the world's coal reserves is much lower than previous estimates.
..
The new model, created by Dave Rutledge, chair of Caltech's engineering and applied sciences division, suggests that humans will only pull up a total - including all past mining - of 662 billion tons of coal out of the Earth. The best previous estimate, from the World Energy Council, says that the world has almost 850 billion tons of coal still left to be mined.
"Every estimate of the ultimate coal resource has been larger," said ecologist Ken Caldeira of Stanford University, who was not involved with the new study.
...
Rutledge argues that governments are terrible at estimating their own fossil fuel reserves. He developed his new model by looking back at historical examples of fossil fuel exhaustion. For example, British coal production fell precipitously form its 1913 peak. American oil production famously peaked in 1970, as controversially predicted by King Hubbert. Both countries had heartily overestimated their reserves.
It was from manipulating the data from the previous peaks that Rutledge developed his new model, based on fitting curves to the cumulative production of a region. He says that they provide much more stable estimates than other techniques and are much more accurate than those made by individual countries.
"The record of geological estimates made by governments for their fossil fuel estimates is really horrible," Rutledge said during a press conference at the American Geological Union annual meeting. "And the estimates tend to be quite high. They over-predict future coal production."
More specifically, Rutledge says that big surveys of natural resources underestimate the difficulty and expense of getting to the coal reserves of the world. And that's assuming that the countries have at least tried to offer a real estimate to the international community. China, for example, has only submitted two estimates of its coal reserves to the World Energy Council - and they were wildly different.
"The Chinese are interested in producing coal, not figuring out how much they have," Rutledge said. "That much is obvious."
The National Research Council's Committee on Coal Research, Technology, and Resource Assessments to Inform Energy Policy actually agrees with many of Rutledge's criticisms, while continuing to maintain far sunnier estimates of the recoverable stocks of American coal.
"Present estimates of coal reserves are based upon methods that have not been reviewed or revised since their inception in 1974, and much of the input data were compiled in the early 1970’s," the committee wrote in a 2007 report. "Recent programs to assess reserves in limited areas using updated methods indicate that only a small fraction of previously estimated reserves are actually mineable reserves.”
And don't look to technology to bail out coal miners. Mechanization has actually decreased the world's recoverable reserves, because huge mining machines aren't quite as good at digging out coal as human beings are.
Также смотрите более старый отчёт Peak Coal - Coming Soon?, согласно которому если оценивать добычу угля не в тоннах, а в выделяющейся при сжигании этих тонн тепловой энергии (разные типы угля имеют сильно разную калорийность, и первыми добывают наиболее калорийные угли) то получается что пик добычи угля в США был пройден в 1998 году, а в масштабах всего мира пик угледобычи придётся приблизительно на 2025 год.
Ну и на закуску: Black Gold: Return of the King