I think that there is a major misconception going around about the 'energy crisis'. There really is no energy crisis even within our grandchildrens' lives. There is hundreds of years worth of energy out there, in coal. What we do have are crises in motor fuel and carbon emissions. I am sort of sorry for the provocative title but I think that the distinction is very important and needs to be driven home, because of the environmental implications.
I drove across country a few years ago and a motel owner in Wyoming was telling me how her son works in the Powder River Basin coal mines, and how in his words 'we'll be digging that coal for a million years'. Granted that is just an anecdote, but it is rooted in established truth.
The watt-hours in coal are as energetic as the watt-hours in oil. The main differences are that coal combustion is:
- not suitable for motors
- messy and unpopular for home heating
- emits more carbon and other pollutants.
The economics and geopolitics of peak oil will cause us to overlook/solve the first two problems:
- We WILL use coal to make motor fuel. It is not as challenging or esoteric as people think, with wild-eyed talk of Nazis. Apartheid South Africa, faced with oil import embargos, and with no significant domestic oil industry to lean on (or to be held hostage by), developed the process of turning coal into diesel in the 1970s and 1980s. According to SASOL, plants 2 and 3 produce 140,000 barrels per day of diesel each. Roughly 100-200 such plants (replacing a similar number of refineries) would supply our motor fuel needs. It is economic as long as oil stays high, and it was economic even before when you consider how much we spend securing oil with our defense budget. The underlying technologies are already deployed in large modern projects outside of the SASOL plants: First, gasification of coal, as is currently done in IGCC (this works for biomass too). Then gas to liquid conversion, which is already being deployed as a way to make use of far-flung natural gas deposits.
- I think it is safe to expect that the convenience issue of coal for home heating will be addressed without too much drama with automated pellet-burning furnaces.
That leaves the kicker:
3. It is environmentally bad as currently done. This point, as well as point one, are covered here:
http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/...
It is our responsibility to future generations to either:
- make coal combustion less polluting, through controls and sequestration or
- make it not happen in the first place, or
- burn in a justly deserved hell.
What I am saying, which will anger lots of people, is that 2 is not going to happen, barring cheap practical fusion. I don't need to make any convoluted arguments or anything. It is very simple:
Coal is energy. Energy will be expensive. Coal is abundant. The infrastructure and technology to extract the energy (dirtily) is not just developed, but largely capitalized.
There will be ENORMOUS economic pressure to use coal, pressure the likes of which will make GM or Lockheed's influence on policy look puny. I am not a political scientist but from what I've seen, nothing short of a global popular enlightment would provide sufficient political resistance. I am not willing to bet the environment on that awakening happening.
I think that it is imperative that we develop the technology to sequester coal CO2 in oil and gas traps, and encourage its use with enormous subsidies. This will get the technology matured and capitalized in time for peak oil (maybe). In the near term we can turn coal into motor fuel, and in the long term, wean ourselves off that with electric vehicles, whose electricity will hopefully be from a sequestering coal plant or a renewable source. The truth is, the sooner we do this, the less traumatic peak oil will be, and the sooner we can have a real shot at not giving a crap what goes on in the middle east, which sounds pretty good to me right now.
I don't know what to do with home heating. At least I can use this opportunity to claim I am not a total know-it-all jerk.
To sum up: For economic reasons, it is reasonable to expect that all easily recoverable coal will eventually be burned. We need to proactively develop the technology to keep it from being an environmental disaster. Refusing to do this out of a faith that the political strength or technical silver bullet will be found to stop using coal is, IMHO, an unacceptably risky decision, considering both the environment and our oil-driven military/foreign policy.