[Peak Cheap]. Fin del carbón barato? Nov-2010
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PutinReReloaded
Madmaxista
Es fácil, cuando haya menos gente habrá mas carbón, mas petróleo, mas....
Las papeletas pronto se van a rifar.
Las papeletas pronto se van a rifar.
Que quepamos a menos no significa que quepamos a poco.
Taliván Hortográfico
ПРЕД P И B ВИНАГИ СЕ ИЗПИСВА M
¿El carbón no es esa cosa negra que se extrae en León? ¿Cómo se atreven a decir que es barato?
Barquero
Hasta el toro todo es regazo
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ZP es un cabrón de León, no es carbón ni es barato.:XX:
favelados
Será en Octubre
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Hasta el toro todo es regazo
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Puede que el carbón sea como el petróleo, de formación natural y no de origen fósil. Echad un vistazo a esto: http://www.iccc.es/2007/03/¿es-el-petroleo-abiotico/
Bercipotecado
Bunkerizado
no se yo que decir, me creo lo que dicen los de nature, pero segun los ultimos estudios geologicos realizados en mi zona, y teniendo en cuenta el consumo energetico total del año 2008, y la produccion media por tonelada de carbon en la central termica compostilla II.... Solamente en la cuenca minera berciana, (no incluye la astur, ni la leonesa, etc.... ) habia carbon para alimentar energeticamente durante casi 33 años....
Estando hablando concretamente, de una cuenca que no es la mas grande, de todas maneras, no tengo conocimiento de las reservas en el resto de cuencas, si estan a igual nivel, mejores o peores....
Estando hablando concretamente, de una cuenca que no es la mas grande, de todas maneras, no tengo conocimiento de las reservas en el resto de cuencas, si estan a igual nivel, mejores o peores....
China Faces Potential for Peak Coal Scenario - WSJ.comBy DAVID WINNING
SYDNEY—The idea of peak oil—the point at which global production reaches its maximum—has fixated the energy industry for years. Now, China is grappling with a new worry: peak coal.
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State-run media reported that Beijing is considering capping domestic coal output in the 2011-2015 period, partly because officials worry miners are running down reserves too quickly to meet the needs of a rapidly expanding economy.
"China accounts for around 14% of global coal reserves but its share of global coal consumption is already over triple that at 47%, which is unsustainable," Hong Kong-based brokerage CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets said in a report last month.
Imposing a cap would be significant as China's mining sector is already finding it hard to keep up with domestic coal demand, which has grown around 10% annually over the past decade.
View Full Image
<cite>Zuma Press</cite> A worker shovels coal on a truck at a factory in Nanjing in east China's Jiangsu province earlier this month.
Its net coal imports exceeded 106 million metric tons in the first nine months of the year—higher than the level for 2009 as a whole—and state companies have been aggressively acquiring overseas coal assets to secure long-term supply.
In the three years to September 2010, Chinese companies spent $20.96 billion on overseas coal-sector acquisitions, according to Dealogic.
An output ceiling would also underpin regional coal prices, which are near six-month highs on expectations that China will import record volumes of coal this month and in December.
While China hasn't declared publicly it will impose a coal production cap, the idea is gathering momentum.
Zhang Guobao, head of China's National Energy Administration, said in a speech on Oct. 27 that he doesn't favor the country's coal output expanding above four billion tons a year.
Policy makers are mulling an annual cap of between 3.6 billion tons and 3.8 billion tons in the next five-year plan, running from 2011 to 2015, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported earlier.
This would be unlikely to hurt large state-owned miners, such as China Shenhua Energy Co., as they have invested in modern equipment and can generate economies of scale. Shenhua aims to double its annual coal output capacity to 400 million tons in the 2009-2014 period.
However, small mines and township operations will be under increasing pressure. Shanxi province has closed scores of small mines in a bid to improve safety and efficiency, and Inner Mongolia region and Henan province are taking similar steps.
Even if no official limits are introduced, China can't keep growing coal output much beyond another decade, analysts say. The mining sector is constrained by chronic infrastructure bottlenecks, especially road and rail, and those coal deposits that are easiest to mine have already been tapped.
Experts are starting to predict when China's coal reserves will run out—a nightmare scenario in a country where 70% of its energy is derived from coal.
According to BP PLC, China can only continue at current rates of production for 38 years before its coal reserves are exhausted. That compares with 245 years in the U.S., and 105 years in India.
BP estimates that China had 114.5 billion tons of proven coal reserves at the end of 2009, ranking it third behind the U.S. and Russia. The International Energy Agency says China could have as much as 189 billion tons of coal that it hasn't tapped yet.
Calculating the size of China's coal reserves isn't easy. The government doesn't publish data on discoveries or how much coal can still be recovered from existing mines. Complicating matters further, China's National Bureau of Statistics recently stopped issuing monthly output figures.
In addition, not all coal has the same energy content. That's significant as many new discoveries in Inner Mongolia are of poorer quality than the coal reserves being depleted in Shanxi.
But the strength of China's coal demand, and moves by miners to raise output in step, is worrying the market as well as Beijing.
Even if China's annual coal demand growth halved to 5% then the country would run out of coal in 21 years unless it finds material new deposits, CLSA says, using 114.5 billion tons of reserves as a benchmark.
The picture isn't much brighter when calculations use IEA estimates of China's proven reserves. Annual consumption growth of 5% would see China run out of coal in 28 years, it forecasts.
"With either estimate, it is clear that the rapid increase of coal production puts China's energy security at risk," CLSA says.
Write to David Winning at david.winning@dowjones.com
PD: He visto que en el título he puesto peak cheap en vez de peak coal. Algún moderador que lo cambie please?
Should we be planning for the end of cheap coal?Should we be planning for the end of cheap coal?
By John Timmer | Last updated <abbr class="timeago datetime" title="2010-11-17T20:47:00Z">November 17, 2010 2:47 PM
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Arkansas Geological Survey
The recent IEA report on global energy use trends contained a bit of a surprise. If oil prices remain high and governments make progress on their emissions goals, there's a possibility that the world has already hit peak oil, and that the next few years will see its use plateau for a while before dropping again. Using these same assumptions, the report also said that we could hit peak coal somewhere within the next 20 years. In today's edition of Nature, a commentary suggests that, even skipping those same assumptions, we may hit peak coal before too long, simply because the best and cheapest sources are vanishing fast.
The authors of the comment unquestionably have an agenda; they come from the Post-Carbon Institute, which clearly has an interest in promoting consideration of a world that doesn't run on fossil fuels. And that agenda is obvious in the article summary, which concludes, "Energy policies relying on cheap coal have no future."
That appears to be in sharp contrast to various estimates that suggest the world's coal supply is enough to keep us going for up to several hundred years. But the key word in the sentence is "cheap." The authors don't deny that there's a lot of coal left out there—although they say it's less than most people think—but they argue that actually using it will get progressively more expensive, a trend that will ultimately make relying on cheap coal a losing proposition.
The authors provide some pretty simple evidence: for the past couple of decades, the projected global supply has been dropping at a rate faster than consumption, which suggests that there's something off with the projections. They blame advances in geology, which have led a number of nations to decide that some reserves that were once thought to be economically recoverable really aren't. For example, South Africa and Germany, which between them have just under 10 percent of the global reserves, have recently seen their estimated recoverable reserves drop more than a third over a five-year span. There could also be some ugly surprises in this area as well. The US, which has over a quarter of the estimated global reserves, hasn't updated its estimate since the 1970s.
New mining techniques and a higher price on coal could place some of these reserves back on the table, but that partially echoes the authors' point: coal won't stay as cheap as it is now.
Another thing that the authors believe will start boosting the price of coal is a mismatch between the sites of supply and demand. Although global demand is remaining pretty steady, China's demand has skyrocketed and continues to rise. It has significant reserves, but hasn't been able to extract them fast enough to keep up with demand. As a result, China has been increasingly reliant on coal imports from places like Australia and the US, which adds significantly to the cost of coal, both in China and in the domestic markets of the exporters.
Given three more years of its current growth rate, China will be absorbing the entire output of the Asia-Pacific exporters. Complicating matters further, the countries that are currently the leading exporters have relatively small reserves and export capacity. There are some reserves in Russia and Kazakhstan that could help feed China's growing demand but, so far at least, these remain largely untapped.
The last issue presented by the authors is the quality of the coal. According to the commentary, although the volume of coal extracted in the US has continued to go up, the amount of energy extracted hasn't changed significantly since the 1990s (frustratingly, there's no source for this figure). In short, we have to mine more to get the same energy. If this trend kicks in globally, it could have a severe impact on the market.
Things that don't get mentioned by the authors are issues like mine safety and the environmental impacts of both mining and burning the coal. Even if you exclude carbon dioxide emissions, coal is an extremely dirty fuel, and health and safety issues haven't been evenly addressed or enforced. Changes in these matters could significantly impact the cost of coal.
As noted above, the authors clearly have a motivation for getting people to consider a future with lower fossil fuel use. Still, they're certainly not the only ones saying that our assumption of nearly limitless coal may need some serious revision; one paper they cite suggested we may already be at coal's peak.
What the authors would like to see is the prospect of limited and expensive coal get a serious consideration; currently, most energy policy decisions, such as a focus on carbon capture and storage for coal plants, assume that coal will remain cheap enough to compensate for its added costs. Work towards efficiency measures and renewable power is advancing, but not at the pace that could easily handle the time frame in which coal supplies may become constrained. Right now, so little consideration has been given to an end to cheap coal that it's difficult to get a clear picture of what would actually be needed.
As a first step, the authors recommend that the US Geological Survey be tasked with providing a current estimate of the current US coal reserves, and the economic cost of extracting them with current techniques. With a figure that's not 40 years out of date, it might be possible to have a more intelligent conversation about policy considerations.
Nature, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/468367a (About DOIs).
Se ha comentado y traducido el artículo de Nature en Qmunty:
El final del carbón barato I
El final del carbón barato II
El final del carbón barato I
El final del carbón barato II
burbujadetrufas
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Gracias por los links, en resumen más de lo sabido, cuando los chinos se pongan a gastar energía a niveles de casi primer mundo la vaca no va a dar de sí para producir tanta leche y nos tendremos que apretar el cinturón... la buena noticia es que las comarcas con cuencas mineras españolas no dejarán de verse como parásitas, llegará un día en que lo de menos será el precio, la sóla disponibilidad sin depender del exterior será un importante activo...
CampanaGAUSS
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Solo espero que cuando España tenga problemas de abastecimiento energético porque su deuda no le permite importar ni gas ni petroleo, y tenga que tirar otra vez de la ÚNICA fuente energética autóctona, todos aquellos que han defenestrado al sector pasen uno tras otro a comerse un correspondiente ración de carbón digestivo, y se les ponga la factura a un nivel correspondiente al elevado coste que representa el volver a abrir las minas cerradas ...
Bercipotecado: en El Bierzo, unos 150 millones de toneladas, y en Compostilla se necesitan al año unas 4 (que ahora es mix de autóctono y del "otro"), y la cuenca berciana es a día de hoy la más viable de las que quedan ...
Bercipotecado: en El Bierzo, unos 150 millones de toneladas, y en Compostilla se necesitan al año unas 4 (que ahora es mix de autóctono y del "otro"), y la cuenca berciana es a día de hoy la más viable de las que quedan ...
En España, al vecino, SIEMPRE se le va a ver como un parásito ...
burbujadetrufas
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Pues no te digo nada las minas del norte de Palencia que llevan cerradas decenas de años, estoy casi seguro que veré como se reabren en pocos años (10-15).
http://www.barruelo.com/barruelo/historia/descubrimiento-del-carbon.php
