USGS paper has new estimate on coal resources
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The US Geological Survey report is the first entirely digital look at the nation's coal resources. |
August 5, 2009 ·
As politicians debate the merits of a country that relies not on fossil fuels but renewable energy, others are still trying to figure out how much coal still remains in America.
Last month, the United States Geological Survey published a paper that attempts to quantify the country’s coal resources.
The report is one of the many that USGS has published assessing the nation’s coal resources. But this report focuses on the entire country, not just individual basins.
Brenda Pierce is the program coordinator of USGS’ energy resources program. She says the report is the first entirely digital look at coal resources. Her team spent years putting data into Geographic Information Systems databases.
The report focuses on coal "resources," which is a term that refers to all the coal that’s in the ground. Only a relatively small subset of the coal in the ground is technically recoverable or economically recoverable at any one time.
The USGS publication doesn’t focus on West Virginia specifically, but does include data on both the Northern and Central Appalachian Basins, which stretch across the state. The numbers aren’t new: there is a finite amount of coal in the basins.
Of the total resources which were once in the ground, the USGS estimates that only 13 percent are economically recoverable in the Northern Appalachian Basin. For the Central Appalachian Basin, only 10 percent are economically recoverable.
The paper also predicts that there are few large surface-minable resources remaining.
“It’s not rosy or not rosy,” Pierce said. “I think why we did this was it was important to have a realistic picture about what’s technically accessible and economically accessible. And that doesn’t mean it won’t change.”
Pierce says that assessments like this one help policymakers figure out what the future holds for coal as an energy source.
“What was technically recoverable or minable 100 years ago is certainly not the same as what’s minable today,” she said.
“Yet this gives one a picture to compare where things are compared to each other, what we might need to think about in terms of policy or trade-offs, or technology that we might need to develop in the future to be able to use this.”
But as one chapter of the report notes, the amount of coal left in the ground doesn’t matter if it can’t be burned in compliance with the Clean Air Act.
The coal in the Appalachian basins has a higher sulfur content than the coal in the West, and unless power plants are equipped with scrubbers or other technology is developed, demand for Appalachian coal may decrease.