Richard Heinberg’s Museletter: The Great Coal Rush (and Why It Will Fail)

The world appears poised for a headlong sprint toward greater dependence on coal. This book’s purpose is to examine one crucial question that will shape this next great coal rush: How much is left?

The answer from conventional wisdom is, Lots. Coal appears to be the most abundant of the conventional fossil fuels, and everyone agrees that enormous quantities remain to be extracted. Most policy makers would prefer simply to leave it at that. Decades-old estimates assure us that there is 150 years’ worth of supply at current rates of production; therefore we should be able to enjoy plenty of coal for several generations to come.


However, as we will see, this conventional wisdom is in need of substantial correction.

In Chapter One, we will see how coal supplies are estimated, and why new studies are challenging longstanding assumptions of abundance. As we will learn, estimating coal reserves is a complex task, and in many cases published figures are highly misleading. Then in following chapters we will look in some detail at coal reserves in China, the US, and the rest of the world, seeing how supply shortfalls are likely within decades – in some nations, within years. We will also examine the implications of this new information for our understanding of the crisis of global climate change, and will explore the likely impacts of supply constraints on the various industries that depend on coal – principally, electrical power generation and steel production.

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