Frank Kaminski
Energy Bulletin
Richard Heinberg’s new book Blackout tries to demolish current assumptions about the world’s remaining coal endowment: namely, that it is immense beyond belief, barely tapped and will last for centuries to come. Heinberg argues that these assumptions are off-base, misleading and not at all supported by recent studies that suggest global coal production could peak in less than two decades. He warns that an impending shortage of minable coal threatens to plunge our civilization into one final, irreversible Blackout unless we act wisely.
Heinberg makes his case well. One of the things that I’ve always admired about his writing is the way he tries to avoid any potential for bias by considering all possible viewpoints and contributing factors with regard to a given issue, even those that might weaken his argument. Nowhere is this even-handed approach more evident than in Blackout, where he discusses not only the pessimistic reports on remaining coal reserves, but also those that he considers to be overly optimistic. In short, Heinberg can always be counted on to give us fact without inflammation. …
The impetus for Blackout came two years ago, with the publication of a report titled “Coal: Resources and Future Production.” Authored by a group of independent analysts for Energy Watch Group in Germany, the report analyzed the latest available data on the world’s remaining coal deposits, and came to some sobering conclusions. Above all, it found that our current data on global coal reserves are of very poor quality, since many countries’ reserves figures are woefully out-of-date, having not been updated, in some cases, in several decades.
And of the nations that have actually made the effort to update their proven reserves figures, all but two—India and Australia—have revised them substantially downward over the past two decades. Some of these downward revisions have been staggering. For example, Botswana, Germany and the United Kingdom have all downgraded their proven reserves by more than 90 percent (Germany’s downgrades were the sharpest, with proven hard coal reserves plummeting by a stunning 99 percent!). Further, the report found that the United States, which we’ve all been told has something like two centuries’ worth of coal left, has in fact already peaked in its production of high-quality coal. And even the world’s total in-situ coal resources have been reduced by 60 percent over the past 25 years, from 10 trillion tons of hard coal equivalent to 4.2 trillion tons.
The study authors conclude that such drastic reductions are far too significant to simply represent the quantities of coal that have been mined and produced in the time since reserves were last assessed. Instead, they are most likely the result of coal-producing countries having better data now than they once had. And the authors see global coal production peaking, in the best case, in 2025 at 30 percent above present levels of production. …
Heinberg may be right that our modern world is doomed to descent into one great, irrevocable Blackout within our lifetimes barring some unprecedented, coordinated worldwide switch to renewables. On the other hand, it may be that innovative technologies will dramatically increase the total amount of economically extractable coal, bringing on a decades-long glut of the stuff—as well as great peril to our environment. But whichever winds up being the case, Heinberg is certainly right about the need to cut our carbon emissions as quickly as we can, just in case Earth’s climate turns out to be far more sensitive to our emissions than we’re currently able to fathom.
I don’t know which side is right in the peak coal debate—but I do know that Blackout is an important and timely book. In the form of this compact volume, one of the best and most productive peak oil authors working today has turned his customary scholarship, wisdom, wit and writing prowess to some of the most critical issues now unfolding on our planet.