The eventual peak in World fossil fuel output is a potentially serious problem for human civilization. Many people have studied this problem, including Jean Laherrere, Steve Mohr, Paul Pukite (aka Webhubbletelescope), and David Rutledge.
I have found Steve Mohr’s work the most comprehensive as he covered coal, oil, and natural gas from both the supply and demand perspective in his PhD Thesis. Jean Laherrere has studied the problem extensively with his focus primarily on oil and natural gas, but with some exploration of the coal resource as well. David Rutledge has studied the coal resource using linearization techniques on the production data (which he calls logit and probit).
Paul Pukite introduced the Shock Model with dispersive discovery which he has used primarily to look at how oil and natural gas resources are developed and extracted over time. In the past I have attempted to apply Paul Pukite’s Shock Model (in a simplified form) to the discovery data found in Jean Laherrere’s work for both oil and natural gas, using the analysis of Steve Mohr as a guide for the URR of my low and high scenarios along with the insight gleaned from Hubbert Linearization.
In the current post I will apply the Shock model to the coal resource, again trying to build on the work of Mohr, Rutledge, Laherrere, and Pukite.
A summary of URR estimates for World coal are below:
The “Laherrere+Rutledge” estimate uses the Rutledge best estimate for the low case and Laherrere’s low and medium cases for the medium and high cases. Laherrere also has a high case of 750 Gtoe for the World coal URR, which seems too optimistic in my opinion. The “high” estimate of Steve Mohr has been reduced from his “Case 3” estimate of 670 Gtoe by 40 Gtoe because I have assumed lignite and black coal resources are lower than his high estimate.
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