178. COUNTRIES WITHOUT COAL
According to the DOE, this is the list of countries who have no coal reserves at all:
Bermuda, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Falkland Islands, French Guiana, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Martinique, Montserrat, Netherlands Antilles, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent/Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos Islands, Uruguay, Virgin Islands (U.S.), Virgin Islands (British), Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, Gibraltar, Iceland, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Switzerland, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Bahrain, Cyprus, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, Comoros, Conga Brazzaville, Ivory Coast, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Namibia, Reunion, Rwanda, Saint Helena, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Western Sahara, American Samoa, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, Cook Islands, Fiji, French Polynesia, Guam, Hong Kong, Kiribati, Laos, Maldives, Mongolia, Nauru, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Tonga, U.S. Pacific Islands, Vanuatu, Wake Island.
In addition, the following countries have very small reserves which could only fuel their power grids for less than five years: Austria, France, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, UK, Egypt, Malawi, Zambia, Burma, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Nepal, New Caledonia, Taiwan.
Clearly, the idea of switching back to domestic coal isn't an option for this mass of humanity. They aren't going to be liquefying coal for their vehicles, or building coal-fired power plants to charge electric cars. Many of the most hard up are going to need coal for their power grids, unless we're planning to take them all nuclear. These countries who need coal are going to have to use somebody else's, and that somebody is likely to be the U.S. and Australia.
-- by JD
posted by JD @ 1:29 AM
22 comments
22 Comments:
If the U.S doesn't export its coal after peak oil greenhouse gas emmisions would drop and global warming wouldn't be as much of a problem. It would work even better than the Kyoto treaty.
To be honest my first priority has been to figure how the US is going to keep the lights on and not collapse, I hadn't been thinking about the rest of the world.
I'm no longer convinced a die off is inevitible or even all that likely in first world countries, they are likely to outbid poorer countries and keep themselves running which will give them plenty of time to switch to alternatives (albiet at a tremendous economic cost, unemployment will likely be crazy for a good number of years)
However it seems to me that alot of middle class countries are in serious trouble, they aren't rich enough to buy +100barrel oil, switch to alternatives, and they already conserve pretty good. And they are too far into the petroleum era to revert back to their old ways without calamity. I think JD already made this point already actually in one of his entries.
Pretty scary situation for those countries. Fortunately, their adjustments will be less severe, just because they less developed. It won't be as hard for them to take a few steps back i.e. less suburban sprawl, less industry, more agriculturally based lifestyles.
Bah, they could always import the coal.
Or they could do the smart thing, get themselves some reactors.
Some smart things like getting some reactors might be quite hard if you have a huge debt, no knowledge about nuclear reactors and no bonds with nucleair producing countries.
Which holds true for a significant amount of countries in this world. That's one of the reason why around 4.5 billion of the 6.4 billion people on earth live in relative energy poverty.
I don't know what problem you doomers have. Do you think that just by listing all these countries that everybody is going to give up and die. What happened to good old fashioned knowhow. Coal is produced by squeezing turkey guts in between giant mechanical fingers. This Turkey Gut Coal (TFC) is input into the Fischer Tropsch process, a catalyzed chemical reaction in which carbon monoxide and hydrogen are converted into liquid hydrocarbons of various forms. dumb shits
Anonymous:
I do not know what problems doomers have either. But I do know your problem. You are too dumb. How many turkeys you need to provide enough turkey guts to produce any significant amoutn of coal, eh?
and what feeds the turkeys??? what's the EROEI of TFC?
Well, obviously this is only used on waste turkeys and hence is a form of recycling. Were it to be used as a primary source it would obviously be preferable to use whatever vegetable matter you would otherwise feed to the turkeys as input.
That said, the EROEI is probably thoroughly crappy. I can't imagine using the coal intermediary would be any better than thermal depolymerization. TD is going to be the big thing in bio-hydrocarbons. (After biodiesel, of course, and ethanol if we can make it efficient.)
I'm not entirely convinced peak oil will hit before several false peaks, think Hurricanes Katrina&Rita (which, according to doomers, should have completely destroyed the US, it was a significant amount of oil made unavailable for the 2 weeks it took to open the SPR) level of economic damage, over and over, possibly several times a year.
The tighter supply and demand are, the greater the chance of this happening, a single large field suffering problems or going offline could cause a "false peak". Say we lost a 2mpbd (hypothetical) field tomorrow and it hit 10% decline, well oil wouldn't have peaked we still got a fair number of large producing reserves offline, but for all intents in purposes it would have the same economic effect as peak oil for at least a few months.
The eroei of Turkey Gut Coal (KFC)is thousands:1. What is more important is that KFC biodiesel can act as a short term liquid fuel replacement and in the short term until the KFC gasoline-replacement is figured out then we can still drive like we should. kapeesh?
Doomer? who says im a doomer? I just think that the way of life that we have now (excessive consumption) is bad. We need a new lifestyle, and I try to take an objective scientific look at it. I also believe the earth and our system has limits you know. Earth isn't expanding, and we are not gods and probably never will be. Although many assume that that is so
I think that if we really work together we can get somewhere. But it is inherent to our current society to be more individualistic. And that is a problem. Because in the west, that's where the money and changes take place.
There are too many lifestyles around now and I think we just need to simplify things so that we have one lifestyle. That good ole american lifestyle of buying lots of stuff so that we have jobs and stuff. And how do you know that the earth is not expanding? Volcanos and magma push up the ground everyday, eh.
Peak volcano? Volcano peak? Magma die-off. A burning issue?
Wouldn't it be a lot more efficient to simply retrofit the vehicle fleet to run on straight turkey guts (STG)? ::)
Right, I'll get my coat now.
A very large majority of the global population live in countries which posses nuclear technology. OECD+China+India is what, 4 billion people?
Allright, I'll bite. What's OECD?
OECD means Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, it's the collection of developed countries and is the opposite of OPEC, i.e., petroleum consumers.
Nuclear technology is not a viable solution. At current consumption rate, economically mineable Uranium will be used up in 50 years if you do a simple division. The Hubbert Peak of Uranium will be much earlier, probably within the next 10 years. Not to meantion that that is calculated based on current LOW consumption rate of Uranium.
Low grade Uranium resource is much more abondent, as the earth crust contains about 4 ppm (par per million) in Uranium. But mining such Uranium may not be worth it since you spend more energy in mining and extracting the metal than you get back from the nuclear reaction.
What about fast breeder reactors and the fact that no one is really looking for uranium because they haven't had a tremendous incentive to do so given it's current price?
Jesus Christ, here comes the peak uranium boogeyman again.
There are lots of nuclear fuel around, dont worry.
Mining low grade uranium does not have a negative EROI. Please show some extraordinary proof of this extraordinary claim.
Hell, even seawater extraction seems to be energy positive.
And then we have breeders and thorium and new findings and whatnot.
And whatever nonrenewable sources of electricity we use in the near future just have to sustain us until renewables+fusion can be scaled up, i.e. some decades.
"And then we have breeders and thorium and new findings and whatnot. "
This is probably no one with any credibility has made the assertion that the world is about to run out of nuclear fuel.
With fast breeder reactors even seawater extraction is sufficient, and that is in it's infancy (because no one spends money to find something which is abundant in supply)
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