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Page added on June 5, 2010
‘peak coal’ is guide for our oil quandary
Jevons anticipated “peak coal” – and, in doing so, “peak oil,” too. For Mr. Jevons, the distinction was irrelevant. When you spoke of coal, you necessarily spoke of petroleum. When you spoke of petroleum, you necessarily spoke of coal. “What is petroleum,” he asked, “but the essence of coal?”
Mr. Jevons provides the modern reader will an eerie sense of déjà vu. In the mere dawn of the Age of Coal, he writes of the debate in Britain over the next principal source of cheap energy. The alternatives are mostly the same now as they were a century and a half ago (with the single significant exception of nuclear power): water power, wind power, tidal power, solar power – “all the supposed substitutes,” as Mr. Jevons expressed it, “for coal.”
Mr. Jevons, however, was not persuaded. Coal itself, he said, “possesses all the characteristics that entitle it to be considered the best natural supply of motive power.” Coal, he said, was like a spring – “wounded up through the geological ages for us to wind down.”
In a seam of coal, he said, “we have a peculiar store of force collected for us from sunbeams.” Containing light and heat, and bottled up in the earth, coal brings forth a stupendous supply of energy “to work for human purposes.”
Mr. Jevons anticipated that coal’s store of energy would make Britain the most powerful and the most productive country in the world. Combined with the laissez-faire economics of the Victorian Age, he predicted, coal would bring forth great scientific and cultural achievement and unprecedented prosperity.
A single pound of coal, he noted, can lift a million times its own weight– and the useful power in coal is 2,800 times the power expended in getting it to the place it could be put to work. In a word, he pronounced coal’s inherent energy “incredible.”
3 Comments on "‘peak coal’ is guide for our oil quandary"
Edpeak on Sat, 5th Jun 2010 11:35 am
“A single pound of coal, he noted, can lift a million times its own weight”
Lift it how far up? Without this additional piece of information, what we have is a statement that isn’t wrong, we have a statement that is devoid of useful meaning.
Stu on Sat, 5th Jun 2010 3:08 pm
A commonly held belief with Peak Oil mitigators is that coal production will ramp up and we will use coal to liquids technology to make up the short fall of oil production. Not so. Once the depletion of oil gets on the way it will cause economic resession that makes the recent one look like a walk in the park. If you really believe that in that environment of oil scarcity and ultra high prices that we will then ramp up coal production drastically, which will use massive amounts of oil to achieve……think all those machines that run on oil that are used to mine, process and transport coal….then we use the coal to produce liquids…..and then most of the liquids produced go into mining, processing and transporting more coal. If there is any net energy benefit it wont be much and the environmental costs will be staggering. All sources fo energy are just derivatives of oil. Solar, wind, nuclear, coal, etc etc…..all require massive amounts of oil to produce the infrastructure and maintain it. When oil declines…..so does everything……there maybe a short term ramp up of some alternatives……but when the decline of oil really kicks in…..the only way you will be able to spare massive chunks of the remaining production to go into producing more alternative energy sources is if you starve other uses of oil to create the spare oil to use…..what do we cut from……transport….food production…..whatever you cut from you worsen the economic collapse and thus the ability to raise capital to use in the new projects. None of the alternative all combined can replace oil because when oil is gone, most of the energy created from the alternative is going to be used up maintaining the alternatives. Think of a world running on solar power….where does the power come from to keep replacing panels as they degrade, get broken, storm damage……from the solar power of course….so you get the power from the solar panels to mine more aluminium, other metals….create silicon wafers, and run huge factories and mine sand and transport it….in massive ships and trains…….all from the installed solar……whats left to provide for all the other industries…..and whats left after that for all the residential use…….bottom line is we are all going to have to make drastic cuts in our energy use……and efficiency measures will not be enough….if they can make your giant flat screen use 150 watts instead of 300….it wont do….it’s still 150 watts of dicretionary power used the produces nothing anybody needs…….we will have to get used to the idea that we are going back to days when houses had fridges and lights running on electricity and very little else…….the rule in the future will be…..if you don’t need to use electricity for something…..you don’t……same will go for fuel of all sorts……..energy will become like water is to people who live in deserts. Thats how it was before oil…and thats how it will be again. And before you say……but people mined coal and other stuff before oil…….yes…..back in the days when you could find it sticking out of the ground or not far beneather the surface…..its all gone…..now we have to dig hundreds of meters deep and clear whole areas to get it…same with all metals….we are at the stage where we have to high high tech energy intensive methods to mine or extract anything…..and without those high tech energy entensive machines and methods…..we have no access to anything anymore……..back to stone age we go
Paul on Sat, 5th Jun 2010 4:35 pm
Stu
Oil won’t actually run out. PO means demand is greater than production which causes overwhelming price amelioration.
It’s this price increase which will necessarily dictate oil use. Using hydrocarbons to build solar arrays instead of moving a car a few blocks will make significant sense.
We will not run out of oil in our lifetimes and probably not in our grandchildrens either. We’ll simply be using it for different things i.e. production rather than consumer use perhaps.