China is aware that its coal is running out and that it needs new sources of energy. The rest of the world blunders along on the assumption that fossil fuels will remain plentiful.
Guest essay by David Archibald
At a conference on coal gasification in Colorado Springs on 12th October, the lead speaker was Dr Yong-Wang Li of Synfuels China. The third slide of his presentation contained this statement:
That includes coal. There are people being born in China today who will see the end of coal. This agrees with my own analysis which has China having burnt through half of its coal endowment by 2025:
Coal production in China is relatively opaque. Last month the E.I.A. revised its estimate of Chinese energy consumption from coal by 14%. Despite China’s agreements with the Obama administration to curtail carbon dioxide emissions, and its finite reserves, China is further increasing its coal consumption by building coal-to-synthetic natural gas (SNG) plants. Possibly more than 30 will be built, increasing coal consumption by more than 400 million tonnes per annum. According to theory of the consumption of a finite resource, production cost rises once half of the resource has been consumed. On that basis, the cost of doing everthing in China will start rising appreciably from 2025 and China’s relative competitiveness will start declining.
As Dr Li noted, China has to develop new energy resources. At least China is aware of their problem. In 2014, the team developing the Chinese thorium molten salt reactor were told to do in ten years rather than the original 25 years they had given themselves. Researchers working on the project said they were under unprecedented “war-like” pressure to succeed. Ideally, for China, the decline in coal production coming from the mid-2020s will be seamlessly replaced by a ramp up in nuclear power production from thorium reactors.
>>My country (The UK) has hundreds of years of Coal still available.
i don’t think people here understand what peak-something is. It is NOT when a resource runs out, it is when production slows for whatever reason, or demand exceeds supply. In the case of UK coal, we reached Peak Coal in 1913. So how anyone can say that peak-something is a myth is beyond me.
And there is no point shouting “Malthusian” as a typical Left-Green technique of shutting down the debate. And there is no point claiming we will find another resource. And there is no point saying there is still coal in the ground, because we will never reach 1913 output again – ever. The inescapable fact of the matter is that due to economic and social conditions, the UK reached Peak Coal in 1913.
End of story. Stop denying it.
http://myrenaultzoe.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Post1_Figure1_CoalProd_Caltech_c.jpg
In the same sense we had Peak Flint just before the Stone Age ended.
But I take Peak Oil, Gas and Coal to relate to the globally accessible deposits. Furthermore, US peak oil was in the 70-ties after which production in the US steadily declined. Then came the shale boom and suddenly the whole concept went out of the window. Who knows if, a century from now, UK coal makes a comeback based on completely new, and now unimagined, technology. I for one would not bet against it.
>>But I take Peak Oil, Gas and Coal to relate to the globally accessible deposits.
There is no point relying on world supply if there is a crisis or the producer nation gets richer. They will be keeping supply for themselves. Besides, the UK is a microcosm and template for the wider world. What can happen in the UK can and will happen in the wider world at some point in time. So there is no point denying the reality of Peak-something. It can and will happen, even if forecasting it is half science and half astrology.
Ralph
Friends:
I see ralfellis is again promoting his daft ideas of peak fossil fuels. Therefore, I will yet again refute that nonsense with reality.
I begin by explaining some basic terms which ralfellis does not understand.
1. Reserves and resources
A reserve of a mineral (e.g. stone, metal ore, coal, crude oil, etc.) is the known amount of the mineral which can be obtained at economic cost using existing technology.
A resource of a mineral is the estimated amount of the mineral which can be obtained using existing or imagined technology.
Reserves usually INCREASE as resources are depleted.
This is because the value of a mineral is affected by its availability.
To understand this, please consider the simplified case of 3 men who each own a field which contains diamonds.
Man A has one diamond on the surface of his field.
Man B has 10 diamonds 10 meters below the surface of his field.
Man C has 100 diamonds 100 meters below the surface of his field.
The resource is 111 diamonds (i.e. 1+10+100 diamonds) but the reserve is only one diamond.
Man A can find and obtain his diamond at much cheaper cost than Man B and Man C can find and obtain theirs. So, Man A can undercut the price for a diamond demanded by the others.
Then Man A sells his diamond.
The reserve then increases to 10 diamonds because Man B can now undercut Man C, but the resource reduces to 110 diamonds. Also, the cost and price of diamonds increases.
Then Man B sells his diamonds.
The reserve then increases to 100 diamonds but the resource reduces to 100 diamonds.
This, of course, assumes the need for diamonds is such that there is no alternative to paying the cost of Man C to obtain his diamonds. Diamonds from somewhere else or an alternative to diamonds may be cheaper, and – in that case – the alternatives become the reserves.
2. Limits to minimum magnitude of reserves
People do not pay to find more reserves when they have the reserves they need.
This is why oil reserves were equivalent to ~40 years of supply throughout the twentieth century and will be at least ~40 years of supply throughout this century. Oil companies have a maximum planning horizon of ~40 years so pay for more oil to be found if they have less reserves than needed for the next ~40 years. But they do not pay to find more reserves when they have enough.
2. Limits to growth imposed by the finite nature of resources (e.g. Peak Oil)
In the real world, for all practical purposes there are no “physical” limits to natural resources so every natural resource can be considered to be infinite. This also is a matter of basic economics which I explain as follows.
Humans do not run out of anything. The usage of a resource may “peak” then decline, but the usage does not peak because of exhaustion of the resource (e.g. flint, antler bone and bronze each “peaked” long ago but still exist in large amounts).
A resource is cheap (in time, money and effort) to obtain when it is in abundant supply. But “low-hanging fruit are picked first”, so the cost of obtaining the resource increases with time. Nobody bothers to seek an alternative to the resource when it is cheap.
But the cost of obtaining an adequate supply of a resource increases with time and, eventually, it becomes worthwhile to look for
(a) alternative sources of the resource
and
(b) alternatives to the resource.
And alternatives to the resource often prove to have advantages.
Both (a) and (b) apply in the case of crude oil.
Many alternative sources for crude oil have been found. These include opening of new oil fields by use of new technologies (e.g. to obtain oil from beneath sea bed) and synthesising crude oil from other substances (e.g. tar sands, natural gas and coal). Indeed, since 1994 it has been possible to provide synthetic crude oil from coal at competitive cost with natural crude oil and this constrains the maximum true cost of crude.
Alternatives to oil as a transport fuel are possible. Oil was the transport fuel of military submarines for decades but uranium is now their fuel of choice.
And synthetic crude oil (i.e. syncrude) can be made from coal. This has been possible for more than a century by use of the Fischer-Tropsch process that has been developed into the SASOL process in South Africa.
Importantly, the existing price constraint on crude oil is the Liquid Solvent Extraction (LSE) process for coal into oil. We proved the LSE technology both practically and economically with a demonstration plant at Point of Ayr, Wales, in the early 1990s. (There are several papers on LSE in the public domain and UNESCO commissioned one on it from me when I was the Senior Material Scientist at the UK’s Coal Research Establishment where we devised and developed LSE. But the UK government owns some important technical details of it.)
There is sufficient coal to provide synthetic crude oil for at least the next 300 years. Hay to feed horses was the major transport fuel 300 years ago and ‘peak hay’ was feared in the nineteenth century, but availability of hay is not a significant consideration for transportation today. Nobody can know what – if any – demand for crude oil will exist 300 years in the future.
In summation, any claims of peak fossil fuels are a fantasy fabricated from ignorance.
Richard
So says the commie who believes in the great fairy at the bottom of his garden. Or is it behind a cloud? Please do tell, Rich, we would love some evidence.
Archibald fails to understand that the term “reserves” (of a resource) is not so much a volumetric number as it is an economic statement. As the value of reserves increases, the amount that is economically recoverable increases. US oil reserves that are economically recoverable (at $45/BBL compared to $100/BBL) have recently dropped precipitously.
Excellent observation. Just like the recent article on last chances, how many similar idiots have told us we’d absolutely positively run out of oil for gasoline by 1970, no wait 1975, no 85, 2000, 2015, etc.
Sure, China MIGHT need to import more, maybe even lots more, coal to feed it’s current construction of electricity generating stations. I’m sure Australia and Wyoming would love to ship them more. This provides America and Australia good jobs in mining, rail, ports and shipping. Many people fail to understand the “invisible” hand of free markets. Invisible in this sense does not mean imaginary. It just means that people free to conduct business will match demand with supply if there’s a benefit for both parties. While it is a true statement to say that the amount of coal under the ground on our planet is finite, no one would dispute that there is a lot remaining, and with a higher price, the efforts humans will make to find it and extract it will increase as well.
David, as is far too often a problem in climate science, you have not identified the data that you are using. You present a lovely graph to back up your somewhat vague claims, without a single word as to its provenance.
Your claims may indeed be right, but using an uncited, unreferenced graph to back them up is alarmism of the worst order.
w.
China: Just remember that China has a command economy and the economic things that happen are decreed by the central planners, with or without the benefit of market forces.
Thorium reactors: Thorium is only one neutron away from becoming uranium, which is the key fact of any thorium nuclear fuel scheme. Then, it’s uranium all the way. Reprocessing of nuclear fuel alleviates the burn-up efficiency problem (just ask the French) and allows the use of mixed-oxide fuel (burning plutonium). Everyone is aware that there are thousands of tons of uranium in a cubic kilometer of seawater, right?
My personal fave: Boron-10. The reaction B10 + n => He4 + Li7 releases just as much energy per unit of mass as nuclear fission, without any gamma rays or extra neutrons. All one needs is a neutron source, which can easily be provided by a small conventional reactor. How much boron is there in the world? About half of it is B10.
Let me add that as of 2013, proven coal reserves were 891,531 million tonnes, and annual coal consumption was 7,896 million tonnes. In other words, proven reserves alone are enough for 112 years of consumption at current rates. (Figures from the BP Statistical Report)
w.