Estimating long-term world coal production with logit and probit transforms

By David B. Rutledge. 2011

164 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An estimate for world coal production in the long run would be helpful for developing policies for alternative energy sources and for climate change. This production has often been estimated from reserves that are calculated from measurements of coal seams. We show that where the estimates based on reserves can be tested in mature coal regions, they have been too high, and that more accurate estimates can be made by curve fits to the production history. These curve fits indicate that total world production, including past and future production, will be 680 Gt. The historical range for these fits made on an annual basis from 1995 to 2009 is 653 Gt to 749 Gt, 14% in percentage terms. The curve fits also indicate that 90% of the total production will have taken place by 2070. This gives the time scale for considering alternatives. This estimate for total production is somewhat less than the current reserves plus cumulative production, 1163 Gt, and very much less than the amount of coal that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, assumes is available for its scenarios. The maximum cumulative coal production through 2100 in an IPCC scenario is 3500 Gt.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f0c329d80d9be8123f9537936284c1f3378dc7a

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Citations in the corpus

Fossil fuel depletion and socio-economic scenarios: An integrated approach (2014, background): “…it that global coal and uranium reserves are ample and supply restrictions due to scarcity must not be expected within the next several decades or even this century, but this is disputed by several studies (Dittmar, 2013; EWG, 2007; Heinberg and Fridley, 2010; Mohr and Evans, 2009; Rutledge, 2011).”
The 21st century population-energy-climate nexus (2016, methodology): “Coal production before 1981 was extended back using Rutledge (2011).”
Developmental States and Sustainability Transitions: Prospects of a Just Transition in South Africa (2016, methodology): “However, both Rutledge (2011) and Mohr and Evans using variants of the ‘Hubbert curve’ technique estimate that remaining recoverable coal reserves in South Africa may be as low as 10 Gt. Hartnady (2010) estimates there could be 15 Gt of remaining coal reserves and forecasts a peak in domestic coal…”