Richard Heinberg
A soon-to-be-released study by the Energy Watch Group in Germany on the future of global coal supplies has implications so surprising and far-reaching that energy policymakers may take years to digest it. This essay is intended to help speed that process. The report’s central conclusions are that minable global coal reserves are much smaller than is commonly thought, and that a peak in world coal production is likely within only ten to fifteen years. …
About 90% of coal reserves are concentrated in 6 countries: USA, Russia, India, China, Australia and South Africa. The USA alone holds 30% and is the second largest producer. China is by far the largest producer but contains only half of the reserves of the USA. Therefore the development of these two countries is a key for future coal production.
However, the report’s authors (Werner Zittel and Jˆrg Schindler) are of the opinion that “the data quality is very unreliable,” especially for China, South Asia, and the Former Soviet Union countries. Some nations (such as Vietnam) have not updated their “proved reserves” for decades, in some instances not since the 1960s. China’s last update was in 1992; since then, 20 percent of its reserves have been consumed, though this is not revealed in its official figures.
Even more striking is the fact that since 1986 all nations with significant coal resources (excepting India and Australia) that have made the effort to update their reserves estimates have reported substantial downward resource revisions. Some countries—including Botswana, Germany, and the UK—have downgraded their reserves by more than 90 percent. …
…if society finds steep voluntary cuts in the use of coal and other fossil fuels to be economically onerous, there is really no alternative: declines in production will happen anyway, so it is better to cut use proactively and systematically than wait and be faced with shortages and price volatility later. The findings of the 2005 DOE-funded Hirsch report (“Peak of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management”) regarding society’s vulnerability to peak oil apply also to peak coal: time will be needed in order for society to adapt proactively to a resource-constrained environment. A failure to begin now to reduce reliance on coal will mean much greater economic hardship when the peak arrives. …
Given the nature of its findings, the EWG coal report should be regarded with utmost seriousness. Those findings must be examined carefully and checked against other studies (I am aware of a similar study under way in the Netherlands; as soon as it is available I plan to write a follow-up article to compare its results with those of the EWG). If the data and analysis described here hold up, the implications must be faced. World energy will begin to decline very soon, and there probably is no supply-side fix. The most important policies will be ones that have to do with proactive energy curtailment and systemic societal adjustment to lower consumption levels. Those policies will necessarily impact agriculture, transport, trade, urban design, and national electrical grid systems—and everything dependent on them, including global telecommunications.
In other publications I have advocated a Depletion Protocol for oil as a policy tool to enable societies to better adapt to the impending peak in global petroleum production. Depletion protocols for gas and coal, while not as critical (since these fuels are not traded globally to the same extent as oil), could also help with the difficult process of adaptation. Nations that are currently dependent on coal—China and the U.S. especially—would be wise to begin reducing consumption now, not only in the interests of climate protection, but also to reduce societal vulnerability arising from dependence on a resource that will soon begin to become more scarce and expensive.