Re: A short history of energy (in the US)

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for the comments. I hope to do a podcast interview about gasification of coal which has many applications like making diesel fuel from coal (Germany did a lot of this during WW2). It's definitely something that will happen, and is happening right now. The questions are: 1) what do we do with all the CO2? 2) can we build gasification plants quickly enough? And of course 3) how much coal is there?

I have heard lots of claims about coal reserves...I think George Bush once said during a state of the union address that there is millions of years of coal available (he didn't mean to say millions). I've heard anything from 150-300 years. The trouble is, every single estimate that I've come across says 150-300 years of coal left at current consumption. Of course, coal is the fastest growing fuel right now, and doing some simple math, if you include the fact that coal's growth rate is say, 5% per year (meaning every year we consume 5% more coal than the year before), the 300 years of coal left at current consumption drops to less than half that. Also, apparently there's a lot of coal factored into those reserves that we can't actually use right now (according to the book Big Coal).

The one thing about coal reserves though is that it's not as if we've actually had to go out looking for coal, or at least not in the same way we've looked for oil. Coal has always just been there. It's possible that if somebody went out looking for coal, we could come up with more.