The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [89]
Next let’s look at the United States’ history with mining coal, separated out by the different grades (see Figure 17.3).
Figure 17.3 Coal Production by Type (or, Quality)
Source: Energy Information Administration.
Look at the line labeled “anthracite” in Figure 17.3 and see what sort of trend you can discern. What you see is a steadily declining line, which indicates that less and less of the most desirable form of coal is being mined. The reason we aren’t mining more anthracite is because we can’t. It doesn’t exist; it’s pretty much all gone. Our entire “bank account” of anthracite, formed over hundreds of millions of years, has been largely exhausted in a span of about 100 years. Hundreds of millions of years to form; roughly a hundred years to consume. The point bears repeating: When it’s gone, it’s gone. You can’t burn the same lump of coal twice. As with oil, more and more was extracted, and then, due to geological realities, less and less could be extracted. We hit a peak and are far down the backside of that peak here in 2010.
Quite naturally, after anthracite went into decline, efforts then centered on to mining the next-best stuff—bituminous coal—and in Figure 17.3 we observe that a peak in the production of bituminous coal was hit in 1990. Was this because coal companies lost interest in the next-best grade of coal? Hardly. It simply means that we started to run out of that grade, too. Naturally, we then moved on to the next-best grade after that, subbituminous coal, which we see making up the difference to allow U.S. domestic production of coal to continue steadily growing. Most recently, lignite has been getting into the game, although we shouldn’t expect to see lignite production really take off before the production of subbituminous coal peaks, which it someday will.
Now here’s the really interesting part. Remember when I said that the heat content, or available free energy, of coal got progressively worse with each grade? If we plot the total energy content of the coal mined, instead of the tonnage, we get a very different picture (see Figure 17.4).
Figure 17.4 Plot of Coal Tonnage versus Coal Energy
Source: Energy Information Administration.
Where the tonnage has been moving up at a nice, steady rate of 2 percent per year, we find that the total energy content of mined coal leveled off around 1990 and has gone up by exactly zero percent since then. This implies that the United States is using more energy and spending more money to produce more tons of coal, but is essentially getting less energy back per ton for its troubles.
This finding mirrors the results of a 2010 study performed by Patzek, et al., which determined that the net free energy from coal mined at all existing mining operations is nearing a permanent peak, possibly as early as 2011.23 It’s important to note that study did not claim that the tons of coal mined will peak in 2011, but rather that the total net energy from those mined tons will hit a peak. This study wasn’t about the quantity of coal that will be mined (or amount), but its quality (or net free energy). After the peak, there will be slightly less and less available net free energy from coal. Of course, this shouldn’t surprise anyone, because it’s a perfectly logical finding that comports well with common sense. The highest grades of the most-accessible coal were exploited first, leaving the less-energy-dense, less-useful, and less-accessible reserves for later.
Welcome to “later.” The Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that the United States will increase its