When my talk to the Royal Society of Chemists was first arranged this summer, oil cost over $130 per barrel, and we wondered where the price would be in October. Since then much has happened. The credit expansion bubble was pricked in part by inflation stemming from high energy prices, and the global banking system is teetering on the brink of collapse, reprieved only by the spread of social ownership throughout the OECD.

This is a guest post by Dave Rutledge, Chair for the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech, which has 12 departments with 75 faculty members and 500 graduate students.

Dave is fascinated by the possibility that the key to understanding the future of world coal production may be in the history of the mining areas in the northern Appalachians and the north of England. Dave is also interested in the question of how California will make the transition from fossil fuels to renewable fuels for electricity production.

At The Oil Drum, there has been much discussion of the modeling of future oil production and the reliability of reserve data. It is also understood that burning fossil hydrocarbon fuels increases the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, and that this is likely to affect our climate. What about coal? Can we figure out how much coal is likely to be produced, and how quickly the coal reserves will be exhausted? How reliable are coal reserve numbers? What can our models for coal and hydrocarbon production tell us about atmospheric CO2 concentrations? About climate? It turns out that we can give answers to all of these questions, using the same Hubbert linearizations and normal curve fits that we use for oil.

The importance of these approaches to estimating future production is emphasized by this astonishing statement in the pre-publication version of the National Academy of Sciences Report on coal, released yesterday:

Present estimates of coal reserves are based upon methods that have not been reviewed or revised since their inception in 1974, and much of the input data were compiled in the early 1970s. Recent programs to assess reserves in limited areas using updated methods indicate that only a small fraction of previously estimated reserves are actually minable reserves.