179 BQ Answers to Coal DA

8/14/2019 179 BQ Answers to Coal DA

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Coal SmoalDDI 2008 BQSteve Quam

2AC (GENERAL)

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2AC Coal RRs (General)

1. Coal demand decreasing now construction costs and policy uncertainty

John Laumer is an independent energy consultant and news reporter, Along The Green Horizon: Big US Electricity Price

Increase, Tree Hugger Business and Politics, 9/20/07 http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/09/get_ready_for_a.php"But a combination of rising construction costs for coal-fired power-plants and uncertainty over whether Congress will regulate

emissions of carbon dioxide - a byproduct of burning coal and one of the main gases behind global warming - has put plans for

many new plants on hold." "Rising construction costs and uncertainty over global warming laws may lead to higher power

prices for everyone, experts say. With the nation's demand for power expected to surge 50 percent over the next 30 years, theresult may be higher electricity costs for everyone." "An estimated one-third of planned new coal plants have either been

delayed or are "at the edge of cancellation," said Dean Oskvig, head of the energy business at Black&Veatch, an engineeringfirm that builds power plants. Oskvig said cost is the main concern. The global commodities boom has caused the price of

steel, concrete and lumber to soar. Plus, a spike in demand for energy of all kinds has led to a construction frenzy throughout

the sector, driving up the cost of skilled labor. This has doubled the price of building a new coal-fired power plant, said Judah

Rose, an industry expert at ICF Consulting, who testified before the North Carolina Utilities Commission." "Black & Veatch's

Oskvig said carbon capture and sequestration can raise the price of a power plant by 40 to 80 percent -- yet another factor that

will drive power prices higher. "We've been used to really cheap energy to drive our society," he said. "But the days of the

energy bargain in this world are over.""

2. Trucking will put railroads out of businessJohn B. Ficker is President of The National Industrial Transportation League, Testimony of The National Industrial TransportationLeague Before the Subcommittee on Railroads Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, in th eU.S. House of

Representatives, March 31, 2004.While the economic and services bar is being raised higher, the data suggests that, though the freight railroad industry is infar better financial shape than it was in the 1970s, it has not been able to maintain or expand its share of intercity freight

transportation. Freight transportation overall is expected to grow significantly over the next decade. According to the

report entitled Freight Rail Bottom Line published by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation

Officials (AASHTO) in 2000, freight volume is expected to grow fifty percent between 2000 and 2020. Freight railroads need

to be part of that growth. But if the trendsof the past ten years discussed aboveare projected into the nations future in 2020,trucking activity will more than double, while the railroads share of intercity freight revenues will grow only slowly. Such a

situation would result in a massive challenge to the nations existing highway infrastructure. The status quo thus does not

appear to be a model that will result in a rail industry that will fullyparticipate in the growth required to meet the nationsincreased transportation needs.

3. Rising demand doesnt mean railroad investments costs are too high

Congressional Budget Office, Freight Rail Transportation: Long-Term Issues, Congressional Budget Office Paper, January

2006, http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/70xx/doc7021/01-17-Rail.pdfWhy might the railroad industry not respond to rising demand as other industries do? Economic factors specific to the railroadindustry may reduce its ability and willingness to invest in new capacity. Building new track is costly, and because track is

fixed in a specific location, investing in it subjects railroads to the risk that demand will shift to other locations and that the

investment will not yield an adequate return. The other major domestic freight transportation industries, trucking andwater carriers, do not face that kind of risk; instead, the governments that build and maintain highways and water-ways

and the taxpayers who provide their funding bear that risk.

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4. Coal prices are extremely volatile now market uncertainty

Casey J. Kaptur, Senior Financial Analyst Coal and Energy, Pincock, Allen & Holt is a consulting and engineering firm servingthe international mineral resource industry, Trends in U.S. Domestic Coal Markets Are Higher Prices and Higher Price Volatility Here

to Stay? Pincock Perspectives, ISSUE NO. 58 September 2004, http://www.pincock.com/perspectives/Issue58-CoalMarkets.pdf

The jump in coal prices during 2001 described above coincided with a sharp increase in coal price volatility. (As mentioned above,

an increase in prices does not necessarily result in an increase in price volatility nor do high prices by themselves mandate high price

volatility.) Although coal price volatilities have retreated from their 2001 highs, they remain substantially higher than they

were prior to the 2001 price spike. PAH believes that coal price volatilities are likely to remain high. Again, this forecast is

fundamentally different than the conclusion reached above, i.e., that coal prices themselves are likely to remain high. Our forecast ofcontinued high price volatility is based on the prospects for continued uncertainty in coal markets. This uncertainty results from

many of the same factors discussed above, i.e., the impact of foreign metallurgical coal demand, environmental and permitting

constraints, producer financial considerations, etc. In addition, however, events that do not fundamentally alter the supply/demandbalance but do affect short-term market activity, most notably transportation disruptions, can also contribute to high price volatility.

PAH concludes, therefore, that the low prices and low price volatilities that characterized coal markets during the 1990s are unlikely to

be seen again soon. The coal markets of the future will likely be higher priced and change more rapidly and dramatically than they did

in the past.

5. Passenger cards will be able to make up for any loss of profit in freight cars.

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6. Coal will peak by 2025

Strahan, David. (1/19/08) (author of The last Oil Shock: A survival guide to the imminent extinction of petroleum man) "The greatcoal hole: reserves of the black stuff were supposed to last for centuries. But rock bottom could come a lot sooner than that.(Industry

overview)." New Scientist 197.2639 (Jan 19, 2008): 38(4). Academic OneFile. Gale. University of Kansas Libraries. 2 July 2008

The delays have been increasing since 2003, and not just because of the port's limited capacity. Gnawing doubts are also

beginning to emerge about the supply of coal, not just in Australia but worldwide, and not only because of logistics but alsobecause of geology. In short, coal may be running out. Ask most energy analysts how much coal we have left, and the

answer will be some variant of "plenty". It is commonly agreed that supplies of coal will last for well over a century;coal isgenerally seen as our safety net in a world of dwindling oil supplies. But is it? A number of recent reports suggest coal

reserves maybe hugely inflated, a possibility that has profound implications for both global energy supply and climatechange. The latest "official" statistics from the World Energy Council, published in 2007, put global coal reserves at astaggering 847 billion tonnes (see Diagram, opposite). Since world coal production that year was just under 6 billion

tonnes, the reserves appear at first glance to be ample to sustain output for at least a century--well beyond even themost distant planning horizon. Mine below the surface, however, and the numbers are not so reassuring. Over the past

20 years, official reserves have fallen by more than 170 billion tonnes, even though we have consumed nowhere near that

much.What's more, by a measure known as the reserves-to-production (R/P) ratio--the number of years the reserveswould last at the current rate of consumption--coalhas declined even more dramatically.In February 2007, the EuropeanCommission's Institute for Energy reported that the R/P ratio had dropped by more than a third between 2000 and

2005, from 277 years to just 155. If this rate of decline were to continue, the institute warns, "the world could run out of

economically recoverable reserves of coal much earlier than widely anticipated". In 2006, according to the BP StatisticalReview of World Energy, the R/P fell again, to 144 years. So why are estimates of coal reserves falling so fast--and why

now? One reason is clear:consumption is soaring, particularly in the developing world.Global coal consumption rose 35per cent between 2000 and 2006. In 2006, China alone added 102 gigawatts of coal-fired generating capacity, enough

to produce three times as much electricity as California consumed that year.China is by far the world's largest producer

of coal, but such is its appetite for the fuel that in 2007 it became a net importer.According to the International EnergyAgency,coal consumption is likely to grow ever faster in both China and India. Another less noticed reason is that in

recent yearsmany countries have revised their official coal reserves downwards, in some cases massively, and often by farmore than had been mined since the previous assessment. For instance, the UK and Germany have cut their reservesby more than 90 per cent and Poland by 50 per cent. Declared global reserves of high-quality "hard coal" have fallenby 25 per cent since 1990, from almost 640 billion tonnes to fewer than 480 billion--again, larger than could be

accounted for by consumption. At the same time, however,many countries including China and Vietnam have left their

official reserves suspiciously unchanged for decades, even though they have mined billions of tonnes of coal over that period.

Taken together, dramatic falls in some countries' reserves coupled with the stubborn refusal of others to revise their figures

down in the face of massive production suggest that the numbers are not to be relied on.Is it possible that the sturdy pitprop of unlimited coal is actually a flimsy stick? That is certainly the conclusion of Energy Watch, a group of scientistsled by the German renewable energy consultancy Ludwig Bolkow Systemtechnik (LBST). In a 2007 report, the groupargues that official coal reserves are likely to be biased on the high side. "As scientists, we were surprised to find that

so-called proven reserves were anything but proven," says lead author Werner Zittel. "It is a clear sign that something is

seriously wrong." Since it is widely accepted that major new discoveries of coal are unlikely, Energy Watch forecasts thatglobal coal output will peak as early as 2025 and then fall into terminal decline.That's a lot earlier than is generally assumedby policy-makers, who look to the much higher forecasts of the International Energy Agency. "The perception that coalis the fossil resource of last resort that you can come back to when you run into problems with all the others--isprobably an illusion," says Jorg Schindler of LBST.

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7. Peak coal causes economic collapse and mass starvation

David Roffey 01/30/2008 Peak Coal?http://webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/2260/print

The New Scientist of 19 Jan 2008 carries an article, "Coal: Bleak outlook for the black stuff" [1] (subscription required for full

article), belatedly drawing attention to an interesting piece of analysis by Professor David Rutledge of CalTech in a lecture last

October [2], where he suggests that world coal reserves are grossly overstated and could be substantially exhausted this

century. It's well worth watching the whole hour of the lecture, because the PowerPoint alone [3] [3MB] doesn't do his

argument justice.

The implications of his work, if it should be borne out in the real world, spread all over the whole spectrum of debate on

climate change, peak oil and oil substitutes. The good news? If he's right, there isn't enough fossil fuel around to get as far asthe worst scenarios for global heating. On the other side, if he's right, the world economy is going downhill from about 2021

on, as the decline in energy supply enforces the end to economic growth everywhere whether we like it or not.

It turns out that Prof Rutledge is himself working from even earlier work from the German Energy Watch [4] group. Their"Coal Report [5]" from last March cast significant doubt on the declared coal reserves of many countries and predicted that

world coal production could peak in the 2020s - essentially at the point at which China's production peaks, given that China is

producing something like 50% of the world's coal production, yet is still a net importer of coal (as are all of the biggest

producers other than Australia).

The Energy Watch analysis is a classic bottom-up survey of declared reserves and a check over the history of those reserves:the questions they raise over the validity of the statistics come from the many deep anomalies in the declared numbers. They

point out that, in theory, reserves are the remaining known coal deposits that could be recovered with today's technology and

prices. As technology improves and the price rises, reserves should increase, as more of the deposits could be economically

mined. Now, both of those things have been happening for the last many years, with the coal price in particular increasing

sharply alongside oil. And what has happened to the declared reserves? - they've gone down. In fact, they've gone down by

considerably more than the amount that has been mined - at the extreme edge, Germany quietly reduced its declared reserves in

2004 by a mere 99% - from 23 billion tonnes to 183 million tonnes. Assuming that coal is not one of those rare goods that has anegative price elasticity, something else is going on, and the "proven reserves" are turning out to be nothing of the sort.

Prof Rutledge does something completely different to Energy Watch to make his own projections of coal production: he applies

the toolkit of the Hubbert Peak analysis across from oil to coal. Briefly, for the not-too-mathematically-challenged, Hubbert's

analysis takes oil production as being a normal (bell-shaped) curve - and we now know that Hubbert was completely correct on

US oil production being that shape, and many other production curves have historically justified his assumption, for example

the UK coal production curve in Rutledge's slides. Transforming that bell curve into a cumulative plot gives you a (much

smoother) logistic S-curve. One more transformation of that curve, known as Hubbert Linearisation [6], brings us to the curve

of production as a proportion of cumulative production to date. The useful thing about this curve is that 1) it's a straight line, 2)trending down and 3) where it cuts the X-axis is a prediction of the total all-time production limit.

Prof Rutledge also supplies a handy Excel spreadsheet [7] with all of his data and projections, so you can have fun running

your own alternative analyses if you so wish. Again, if you watch the lecture it will help understand the spreadsheet,particularly the several alternative production estimates for China. For our purposes, we'll stick with his best guess predictions.

His "top-down" core predictions differ in detail from the Energy Watch survey predictions, but the overall production curve is

the same: to hit the high point, China is estimated to have 96 billion tonnes of usable coal remaining vs 44 billion tonnes

extracted and 2.4 billion tonnes coming out each year (5 million miners, 4-6,000 deaths per annum from

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5 accidents every day), hits the halfway point in ten years time, and it's all downhill from there, until by 2076 90% of all the

usable coal in the world is exhausted.

One significant difference between the predictions is the ultimate total of coal extractions. Energy Watch quotes (but questions)

World Energy Council [8]reserves estimates as 4.5Tboe (trillion barrels of oil equivalent), while Rutledge puts reserves at

3.5Tboe and projected actual remaining production as 1.6Tboe. The surprising thing about all of these estimates is that ALL ofthem, including the "official" figures, are way below the numbers used in ALL of the IPCC [9] scenarios, which work on an

ultimate extraction of 18Tboe, with up to 11Tboe being extracted and burnt in this century.

Rutledge also revisits the oil and gas projections using the same techniques, with the usual observations about OPEC reserves

and a production midpoint (aka "peak") also around 2020 - a relatively optimistic assumption compared to the ASPO [10]

worst-case. His figure for remaining oil and gas reserves is 3.2Tboe, vs declared reserves of 2.6Tboe. In parallel with the coal

prediction, he points out that this figure is way below EVERY ONE of the IPCC scenarios, which assume 11-15Tboe burnt in

this century.What would this mean for the climate?

If Rutledge is right, there simply isn't enough fossil fuel in the ground to reach the more unpleasant end of the IPCC scenarios:the temperature rise he gets from plugging his numbers into a climate change model is 1.7C - which is still enough to probably

get to the death of the barrier reef and the melting of the Greenland ice cap, but not to the really nasty bits (see Six Degrees

[10]). He also points out that the world takes 800 years or more to recover from that rise, rendering the question of when

exactly we burn the oil and coal relatively unimportant - if we burn it any time in the next few hundred years, we get the

temperature rise - and anyway at least one degree of that rise is coming from the oil and coal we've already burnt - done is

done.

This is pretty optimistic as global heating predictions run these days, and has been criticised for that by those who fear it could

cause complacency - but complacency wouldn't be a reasonable reaction for at least three reasons.

1. Non-conventional oil

One of the obvious impacts of Rutledge's analysis is that in his "business-as-not-very-usual" scenario - ie with no externally

imposed restrictions on burning fossil fuels - conventional fossil-fuel production peaks in 2021 and is pretty much over by theend of the century. If this is right, I can't see any prospect of stopping the exploitation of murky stuff like the Canadian and

Alberta oil/tar sands, which probably only add 1Tboe at most, but have god-awful climate impacts, and would push thatheating prediction over the 2C which even the optimists agree gets us to "dangerous climate change [11]". [Link is to another

fascinating hour's video lecture by NASA's James Hansen on the CalTech site]

2. And then there's the impact on the economy ...

bl

If fossil-fuel production peaks in 2021, as Rutledge predicts, then the main engine of economic growth is gone. World

economic growth after that can only come from increases in energy intensity, ie the amount of GDP you get out of each unit of

energy: historically, this has been quite appreciable, and in times of crisis has been as high as 1.5%pa; or out of growth in non-

fossil-fuel sources of energy: wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear. For the last, let's just mention the term "Peak Uranium" andleave it at that (Energy Watch have a report on it) [12]. For the others, it would be optimistic to expect them to replace more

than 15% of electricity production each over the long term - reversing some growth numbers out of that, electricity accounts

for around 40% of fuel use, so in round terms 20% of total fuel use could come from them over 20 years or so - say a 1%pagrowth in energy availability (possibly double-counted a little with that energy intensity growth number).


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So, in a good year, the limit to economic growth will be 2.5% or less, and that drops to 1.5% or less after 2040 or so. World

population growth rate is a little over 1.1%pa, so GDP/head growth would be limited to 1.4% or less to 2040, and three parts of

bugger-all after that. Compare this to yesterday's IMF forecast [13]:

The IMF's chief economist calls it a significant global slowdown. For the major developed economies, the IMF predicts

continued, but much weaker, growth this year. The new forecast for global economic growth this year is 4.1%, after nearly 5% last

year. There is a very sluggish period ahead for the main rich countries.

So, 4.1% will be very sluggish - how does a maximum of 2.5% or 1.5% sound?

3. and Food? and Deforestation?

The ability of the world to feed nearly 7 billion population is completely dependent on mechanised agriculture - without it, thecarrying capacity of the planet [14] is much lower. It probably won't come to that [15] - but mechanised agriculture, like many

other fuel uses, will probably be sustained by biofuels - ie diverting food production into fuel production, making foods as well

as fuel scarcer and more expensive - and maybe promoting huge amounts of deforestation for palm oil production, adding

significantly to Rutledge's global heating prediction.

8.) New technologies solve derailment

Gary P. Wolf, writer for the Railway Age, 12/97, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1215/is_n12_v198/ai_20300258

The techniques, technologies, and strategies for achieving a zero derailment rate are changing dramatically.

Tremendous strides have been made since the early 1980s in reducing the number of railroad derailments. The chart on

page 45 shows a significant reduction in the derailment rate per million train-miles--a reduction, moreover, that has come about

during a time of increased freight market share and record ton-miles.

New and innovative technologies have contributed to this reduction. As we edge closer to 2000, the question remains: Howdo we go about further reducing the derailment rate to below one per one million train miles? Improvement is possible, but

only with the dedicated resolve of top management and the implementation of basic and advanced technologies.

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Nuke Specific

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Nuke Specific 2AC

1. Coal demand decreasing now construction costs and policy uncertainty

John Laumer is an independent energy consultant and news reporter, Along The Green Horizon: Big US Electricity Price

Increase, Tree Hugger Business and Politics, 9/20/07 http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/09/get_ready_for_a.php"But a combination of rising construction costs for coal-fired power-plants and uncertainty over whether Congress will regulate

emissions of carbon dioxide - a byproduct of burning coal and one of the main gases behind global warming - has put plans for

many new plants on hold." "Rising construction costs and uncertainty over global warming laws may lead to higher power

prices for everyone, experts say. With the nation's demand for power expected to surge 50 percent over the next 30 years, the

result may be higher electricity costs for everyone." "An estimated one-third of planned new coal plants have either been

delayed or are "at the edge of cancellation," said Dean Oskvig, head of the energy business at Black&Veatch, an engineeringfirm that builds power plants. Oskvig said cost is the main concern. The global commodities boom has caused the price of

steel, concrete and lumber to soar. Plus, a spike in demand for energy of all kinds has led to a construction frenzy throughout

the sector, driving up the cost of skilled labor. This has doubled the price of building a new coal-fired power plant, said JudahRose, an industry expert at ICF Consulting, who testified before the North Carolina Utilities Commission." "Black & Veatch's

Oskvig said carbon capture and sequestration can raise the price of a power plant by 40 to 80 percent -- yet another factor that

will drive power prices higher. "We've been used to really cheap energy to drive our society," he said. "But the days of the

energy bargain in this world are over.""

2. Trucking will put railroads out of businessJohn B. Ficker is President of The National Industrial Transportation League, Testimony of The National Industrial TransportationLeague Before the Subcommittee on Railroads Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, in th eU.S. House of

Representatives, March 31, 2004.

While the economic and services bar is being raised higher, the data suggests that, though the freight railroad industry is infar better financial shape than it was in the 1970s, it has not been able to maintain or expand its share of intercity freight

transportation. Freight transportation overall is expected to grow significantly over the next decade. According to thereport entitled Freight Rail Bottom Line published by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation

Officials (AASHTO) in 2000, freight volume is expected to grow fifty percent between 2000 and 2020. Freight railroads need

to be part of that growth. But if the trendsof the past ten years discussed aboveare projected into the nations future in 2020,

trucking activity will more than double, while the railroads share of intercity freight revenues will grow only slowly. Such a

situation would result in a massive challenge to the nations existing highway infrastructure. The status quo thus does not

appear to be a model that will result in a rail industry that will fullyparticipate in the growth required to meet the nations

increased transportation needs.

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Nuke Specific 2AC

3. TURN ROUTES:

(A) 1NC internal link says the only safety improvements have been on thePowder Basin line processed nuclear fuel would go on the CalienteCorridor in Nevada.

(B) Rail transportation of nuclear waste guarantees safety investment in thenuclear routes. ` Only the plan increases investment on the lines thattransport nuclear fuel rods.

DOE Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, 2006, www.orcwm.doe.gov

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QuickTime and aTIFF (LZW) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Nuke Specific 2AC

. Plan trades off with natural gas, not coal. Thats Bollinger.

5. Rising demand doesnt mean railroad investments costs are too high

Congressional Budget Office, Freight Rail Transportation: Long-Term Issues, Congressional Budget Office Paper, January

2006, http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/70xx/doc7021/01-17-Rail.pdfWhy might the railroad industry not respond to rising demand as other industries do? Economic factors specific to the railroad

industry may reduce its ability and willingness to invest in new capacity. Building new track is costly, and because track isfixed in a specific location, investing in it subjects railroads to the risk that demand will shift to other locations and that the

investment will not yield an adequate return. The other major domestic freight transportation industries, trucking and

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water carriers, do not face that kind of risk; instead, the governments that build and maintain highways and water-ways

and the taxpayers who provide their funding bear that risk.

6. Nuclear transportation is safe standards and checks disprove theirderailment impact

DOE Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, 2006, www.orcwm.doe.gov



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Nuke Specific 2AC

7. New tech solves derailment

Gary P. Wolf, writer for the Railway Age, 12/97, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1215/is_n12_v198/ai_20300258

The techniques, technologies, and strategies for achieving a zero derailment rate are changing dramatically.

Tremendous strides have been made since the early 1980s in reducing the number of railroad derailments. The chart on

page 45 shows a significant reduction in the derailment rate per million train-miles--a reduction, moreover, that has come

about during a time of increased freight market share and record ton-miles.

New and innovative technologies have contributed to this reduction. As we edge closer to 2000, the question remains: How

do we go about further reducing the derailment rate to below one per one million train miles? Improvement is possible, but

only with the dedicated resolve of top management and the implementation of basic and advanced technologies.

9. Coal prices are extremely volatile now market uncertainty

Casey J. Kaptur, Senior Financial Analyst Coal and Energy, Pincock, Allen & Holt is a consulting and engineering firm servingthe international mineral resource industry, Trends in U.S. Domestic Coal Markets Are Higher Prices and Higher Price Volatility Here

to Stay? Pincock Perspectives, ISSUE NO. 58 September 2004, http://www.pincock.com/perspectives/Issue58-CoalMarkets.pdf

The jump in coal prices during 2001 described above coincided with a sharp increase in coal price volatility. (As mentioned above,

an increase in prices does not necessarily result in an increase in price volatility nor do high prices by themselves mandate high price

volatility.) Although coal price volatilities have retreated from their 2001 highs, they remain substantially higher than theywere prior to the 2001 price spike. PAH believes that coal price volatilities are likely to remain high. Again, this forecast is

fundamentally different than the conclusion reached above, i.e., that coal prices themselves are likely to remain high. Our forecast of

continued high price volatility is based on the prospects for continued uncertainty in coal markets. This uncertainty results from

many of the same factors discussed above, i.e., the impact of foreign metallurgical coal demand, environmental and permitting

constraints, producer financial considerations, etc. In addition, however, events that do not fundamentally alter the supply/demand

balance but do affect short-term market activity, most notably transportation disruptions, can also contribute to high price volatility.PAH concludes, therefore, that the low prices and low price volatilities that characterized coal markets during the 1990s are unlikely to

be seen again soon. The coal markets of the future will likely be higher priced and change more rapidly and dramatically than they did

in the past.

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Nuke Specific 2AC

10. Coal will peak by 2025Strahan, David. (1/19/08) (author of The last Oil Shock: A survival guide to the imminent extinction of petroleum man) "The greatcoal hole: reserves of the black stuff were supposed to last for centuries. But rock bottom could come a lot sooner than that.(Industry

overview)." New Scientist 197.2639 (Jan 19, 2008): 38(4). Academic OneFile. Gale. University of Kansas Libraries. 2 July 2008

The delays have been increasing since 2003, and not just because of the port's limited capacity. Gnawing doubts are also

beginning to emerge about the supply of coal, not just in Australia but worldwide, and not only because of logistics but alsobecause of geology. In short, coal may be running out. Ask most energy analysts how much coal we have left, and the

answer will be some variant of "plenty". It is commonly agreed that supplies of coal will last for well over a century;coal isgenerally seen as our safety net in a world of dwindling oil supplies. But is it? A number of recent reports suggest coal

reserves maybe hugely inflated, a possibility that has profound implications for both global energy supply and climatechange. The latest "official" statistics from the World Energy Council, published in 2007, put global coal reserves at a

staggering 847 billion tonnes (see Diagram, opposite). Since world coal production that year was just under 6 billiontonnes, the reserves appear at first glance to be ample to sustain output for at least a century--well beyond even the

most distant planning horizon. Mine below the surface, however, and the numbers are not so reassuring. Over the past

20 years, official reserves have fallen by more than 170 billion tonnes, even though we have consumed nowhere near that

much.What's more, by a measure known as the reserves-to-production (R/P) ratio--the number of years the reserveswould last at the current rate of consumption--coalhas declined even more dramatically.In February 2007, the EuropeanCommission's Institute for Energy reported that the R/P ratio had dropped by more than a third between 2000 and

2005, from 277 years to just 155. If this rate of decline were to continue, the institute warns, "the world could run out of

economically recoverable reserves of coal much earlier than widely anticipated". In 2006, according to the BP StatisticalReview of World Energy, the R/P fell again, to 144 years. So why are estimates of coal reserves falling so fast--and why

now? One reason is clear:consumption is soaring, particularly in the developing world.Global coal consumption rose 35per cent between 2000 and 2006. In 2006, China alone added 102 gigawatts of coal-fired generating capacity, enough

to produce three times as much electricity as California consumed that year.China is by far the world's largest producer

of coal, but such is its appetite for the fuel that in 2007 it became a net importer.According to the International EnergyAgency,coal consumption is likely to grow ever faster in both China and India. Another less noticed reason is that in

recent yearsmany countries have revised their official coal reserves downwards, in some cases massively, and often by farmore than had been mined since the previous assessment. For instance, the UK and Germany have cut their reservesby more than 90 per cent and Poland by 50 per cent. Declared global reserves of high-quality "hard coal" have fallenby 25 per cent since 1990, from almost 640 billion tonnes to fewer than 480 billion--again, larger than could be

accounted for by consumption. At the same time, however,many countries including China and Vietnam have left their

official reserves suspiciously unchanged for decades, even though they have mined billions of tonnes of coal over that period.

Taken together, dramatic falls in some countries' reserves coupled with the stubborn refusal of others to revise their figures

down in the face of massive production suggest that the numbers are not to be relied on.Is it possible that the sturdy pitprop of unlimited coal is actually a flimsy stick? That is certainly the conclusion of Energy Watch, a group of scientistsled by the German renewable energy consultancy Ludwig Bolkow Systemtechnik (LBST). In a 2007 report, the groupargues that official coal reserves are likely to be biased on the high side. "As scientists, we were surprised to find that

so-called proven reserves were anything but proven," says lead author Werner Zittel. "It is a clear sign that something is

seriously wrong." Since it is widely accepted that major new discoveries of coal are unlikely, Energy Watch forecasts thatglobal coal output will peak as early as 2025 and then fall into terminal decline.That's a lot earlier than is generally assumedby policy-makers, who look to the much higher forecasts of the International Energy Agency. "The perception that coalis the fossil resource of last resort that you can come back to when you run into problems with all the others--isprobably an illusion," says Jorg Schindler of LBST.

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11. Peak coal causes economic collapse and mass starvation

David Roffey 01/30/2008 Peak Coal?http://webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/2260/print

The New Scientist of 19 Jan 2008 carries an article, "Coal: Bleak outlook for the black stuff" [1] (subscription required for full

article), belatedly drawing attention to an interesting piece of analysis by Professor David Rutledge of CalTech in a lecture last

October [2], where he suggests that world coal reserves are grossly overstated and could be substantially exhausted this

century. It's well worth watching the whole hour of the lecture, because the PowerPoint alone [3] [3MB] doesn't do his

argument justice.

The implications of his work, if it should be borne out in the real world, spread all over the whole spectrum of debate on

climate change, peak oil and oil substitutes. The good news? If he's right, there isn't enough fossil fuel around to get as far asthe worst scenarios for global heating. On the other side, if he's right, the world economy is going downhill from about 2021

on, as the decline in energy supply enforces the end to economic growth everywhere whether we like it or not.

It turns out that Prof Rutledge is himself working from even earlier work from the German Energy Watch [4] group. Their"Coal Report [5]" from last March cast significant doubt on the declared coal reserves of many countries and predicted that

world coal production could peak in the 2020s - essentially at the point at which China's production peaks, given that China is

producing something like 50% of the world's coal production, yet is still a net importer of coal (as are all of the biggest

producers other than Australia).

The Energy Watch analysis is a classic bottom-up survey of declared reserves and a check over the history of those reserves:the questions they raise over the validity of the statistics come from the many deep anomalies in the declared numbers. They

point out that, in theory, reserves are the remaining known coal deposits that could be recovered with today's technology and

prices. As technology improves and the price rises, reserves should increase, as more of the deposits could be economically

mined. Now, both of those things have been happening for the last many years, with the coal price in particular increasing

sharply alongside oil. And what has happened to the declared reserves? - they've gone down. In fact, they've gone down by

considerably more than the amount that has been mined - at the extreme edge, Germany quietly reduced its declared reserves in

2004 by a mere 99% - from 23 billion tonnes to 183 million tonnes. Assuming that coal is not one of those rare goods that has anegative price elasticity, something else is going on, and the "proven reserves" are turning out to be nothing of the sort.

Prof Rutledge does something completely different to Energy Watch to make his own projections of coal production: he applies

the toolkit of the Hubbert Peak analysis across from oil to coal. Briefly, for the not-too-mathematically-challenged, Hubbert's

analysis takes oil production as being a normal (bell-shaped) curve - and we now know that Hubbert was completely correct on

US oil production being that shape, and many other production curves have historically justified his assumption, for example

the UK coal production curve in Rutledge's slides. Transforming that bell curve into a cumulative plot gives you a (much

smoother) logistic S-curve. One more transformation of that curve, known as Hubbert Linearisation [6], brings us to the curve

of production as a proportion of cumulative production to date. The useful thing about this curve is that 1) it's a straight line, 2)trending down and 3) where it cuts the X-axis is a prediction of the total all-time production limit.

Prof Rutledge also supplies a handy Excel spreadsheet [7] with all of his data and projections, so you can have fun running

your own alternative analyses if you so wish. Again, if you watch the lecture it will help understand the spreadsheet,particularly the several alternative production estimates for China. For our purposes, we'll stick with his best guess predictions.

His "top-down" core predictions differ in detail from the Energy Watch survey predictions, but the overall production curve is

the same: to hit the high point, China is estimated to have 96 billion tonnes of usable coal remaining vs 44 billion tonnes

extracted and 2.4 billion tonnes coming out each year (5 million miners, 4-6,000 deaths per annum from


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5 accidents every day), hits the halfway point in ten years time, and it's all downhill from there, until by 2076 90% of all the

usable coal in the world is exhausted.

One significant difference between the predictions is the ultimate total of coal extractions. Energy Watch quotes (but questions)

World Energy Council [8]reserves estimates as 4.5Tboe (trillion barrels of oil equivalent), while Rutledge puts reserves at

3.5Tboe and projected actual remaining production as 1.6Tboe. The surprising thing about all of these estimates is that ALL ofthem, including the "official" figures, are way below the numbers used in ALL of the IPCC [9] scenarios, which work on an

ultimate extraction of 18Tboe, with up to 11Tboe being extracted and burnt in this century.

Rutledge also revisits the oil and gas projections using the same techniques, with the usual observations about OPEC reserves

and a production midpoint (aka "peak") also around 2020 - a relatively optimistic assumption compared to the ASPO [10]

worst-case. His figure for remaining oil and gas reserves is 3.2Tboe, vs declared reserves of 2.6Tboe. In parallel with the coal

prediction, he points out that this figure is way below EVERY ONE of the IPCC scenarios, which assume 11-15Tboe burnt in

this century.What would this mean for the climate?

If Rutledge is right, there simply isn't enough fossil fuel in the ground to reach the more unpleasant end of the IPCC scenarios:the temperature rise he gets from plugging his numbers into a climate change model is 1.7C - which is still enough to probably

get to the death of the barrier reef and the melting of the Greenland ice cap, but not to the really nasty bits (see Six Degrees

[10]). He also points out that the world takes 800 years or more to recover from that rise, rendering the question of when

exactly we burn the oil and coal relatively unimportant - if we burn it any time in the next few hundred years, we get the

temperature rise - and anyway at least one degree of that rise is coming from the oil and coal we've already burnt - done is

done.

This is pretty optimistic as global heating predictions run these days, and has been criticised for that by those who fear it could

cause complacency - but complacency wouldn't be a reasonable reaction for at least three reasons.

1. Non-conventional oil

One of the obvious impacts of Rutledge's analysis is that in his "business-as-not-very-usual" scenario - ie with no externally

imposed restrictions on burning fossil fuels - conventional fossil-fuel production peaks in 2021 and is pretty much over by theend of the century. If this is right, I can't see any prospect of stopping the exploitation of murky stuff like the Canadian and

Alberta oil/tar sands, which probably only add 1Tboe at most, but have god-awful climate impacts, and would push thatheating prediction over the 2C which even the optimists agree gets us to "dangerous climate change [11]". [Link is to another

fascinating hour's video lecture by NASA's James Hansen on the CalTech site]

2. And then there's the impact on the economy ...

bl

If fossil-fuel production peaks in 2021, as Rutledge predicts, then the main engine of economic growth is gone. World

economic growth after that can only come from increases in energy intensity, ie the amount of GDP you get out of each unit of

energy: historically, this has been quite appreciable, and in times of crisis has been as high as 1.5%pa; or out of growth in non-

fossil-fuel sources of energy: wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear. For the last, let's just mention the term "Peak Uranium" andleave it at that (Energy Watch have a report on it) [12]. For the others, it would be optimistic to expect them to replace more

than 15% of electricity production each over the long term - reversing some growth numbers out of that, electricity accounts

for around 40% of fuel use, so in round terms 20% of total fuel use could come from them over 20 years or so - say a 1%pagrowth in energy availability (possibly double-counted a little with that energy intensity growth number).


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So, in a good year, the limit to economic growth will be 2.5% or less, and that drops to 1.5% or less after 2040 or so. World

population growth rate is a little over 1.1%pa, so GDP/head growth would be limited to 1.4% or less to 2040, and three parts of

bugger-all after that. Compare this to yesterday's IMF forecast [13]:

The IMF's chief economist calls it a significant global slowdown. For the major developed economies, the IMF predicts

continued, but much weaker, growth this year. The new forecast for global economic growth this year is 4.1%, after nearly 5% last

year. There is a very sluggish period ahead for the main rich countries.

So, 4.1% will be very sluggish - how does a maximum of 2.5% or 1.5% sound?

3. and Food? and Deforestation?

The ability of the world to feed nearly 7 billion population is completely dependent on mechanised agriculture - without it, thecarrying capacity of the planet [14] is much lower. It probably won't come to that [15] - but mechanised agriculture, like many

other fuel uses, will probably be sustained by biofuels - ie diverting food production into fuel production, making foods as well

as fuel scarcer and more expensive - and maybe promoting huge amounts of deforestation for palm oil production, adding

significantly to Rutledge's global heating prediction.

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General Exts

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Demand Doesnt Solve Infrastructure

Railroads cant keep up with productionJohn B. Ficker is President of The National Industrial Transportation League, Testimony of The National Industrial TransportationLeague Before the Subcommittee on Railroads Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, in th eU.S. House of

Representatives, March 31, 2004.Another aspect of this situation is shown in the growth of rail carriage compared to the growth in U.S. industrial production.

According to AAR figures, between 1993 and 2002, the number of carloads originated by Class I railroads grew by 28.6% and

tons originated grew by 26.5%. Yet, in this same period, U.S. industrial production grew by 36.8%.3 In other words, over an

entire decade, U.S. industrial production grew about twenty-five percent faster than railroads traffic. Even using ton-

miles, the measure of production most favorable to railroads (which measures not only the number of tons transported

but also how far those tons are carried), railroads growth still had not kept pace with U.S industrial production.5 In

other words, today railroads are carrying things primarily coal farther than they carried those things ten years ago,but the number of carloads they carry is failing to keep pace with the growth in the U.S. industrial economy.

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India Offsets

Indias increased demand for coal will offset any lost demand.Jesse Riseborough Staff Writer for Bloomberg. 7/28/08 BHP Says India, Brazil to Lead Coking Coal Demand(Update3) http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601081&sid=a.haYWxlJ. ec&refer=australia

India's coal demand, both thermal and coking, may rise to 1.87 billion tons a year by 2026, K.S. Kropha, joint secretary at

the nation's coal ministry, said on March 5. The nation's use of the commodity is expected to rise 54 percent to 730 million

tons a year by 2012, according to the Planning Commission, while its imports have doubled in the past 10 years, Lambourne

said at the Coaltrans Australia conference in Brisbane.

India is now the second-largest buyer ofcoking coal from the alliance, which sold 9.7 million tons to the country last year,

he said. `Looking forward, we expect demand to remain very strong.''

The markets for both coking and thermal coal are `chronically tight,'' Macquarie said in a July 23 report. Demand fromChinese steelmakers is `booming'' and mine closures in the country because of safety and environmental concerns are

limiting supplies, Macquarie said.

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