Peak coal by 2050

A new study suggests that the world is nearing the peak of readily exploitable reserves of high-quality coal, contradicting prevailing estimates that the globe has enough coal to help meet energy needs for at least a century. Tad Patzek, chairman of the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, said the world could be approaching the peak of coal mining and he predicts that by 2050 the global coal supply will be half what it is today.

Coal plants supply 40 percent of the world’s electricity. So if the prediction is right, we will see a real shake-up of the economy!

This study aside, chemical engineers at Newcastle University in Australia, the electrical engineer David Rutledge at the California Institute of Technology, and a German nonprofit called Energy Watch Group all have estimated that coal production would most likely peak in the next couple of decades. The Global Energy Systems group at Uppsala University (www.fysast.uu.se/ges) has also published a peer-reviewed paper in Fuel about Global Coal Production Outlooks predicting Peak Coal around 2040.

Peak coal around 2050 means that carbon emissions from global coal production would decline by 50 percent by 2050. That’s significantly below most of the carbon emissions scenarios produced by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Patzek’s paper notes of IPCC scenarios, as being “based on economic and policy considerations that appear to be unconstrained by geophysics.”

Meanwhile forecasts for coal use point upward! The London-based World Coal Institute, an industry group including the largest international coal producers, says "the use of coal will rise 60 percent over the next 20 years," and that "coal will last us for at least 119 years." And the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in its most recent international outlook, projects that coal consumption for electricity will grow more than 50 percent by 2035 unless policies are put in place to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions.

It is going to take some more time and more studies for the world to believe in a peak coal. The general idea is that there's more of it underground.