Climate and energy

Americans driving less – for the 12th month in a row (EERE newsletter). Gas prices keep going down (for now)… and it doesn’t matter. Not that the pubic transit part of the following is relevant to most of KS, but I thought this part was interesting:

From November 2007 to October 2008, U.S. residents drove 100 billion fewer miles than the year before, marking the largest ever continuous decline in U.S. driving. October alone saw a year-to-year drop of 8.9 billion vehicle miles, which is the largest October decline since 1971. And while the DOT report doesn’t try to explain the drop in driving, an October report from HNTB Companies says the decrease is partly due to a shift toward public transportation. A nationwide poll showed that more than 24 million U.S. residents—11% of the adult population—are using public transportation more than they did last year, and 16% say they expect to increase their ridership in the coming year. Although many were motivated by high gasoline prices, they also discovered the convenience, traffic avoidance, and environmental benefits of public transit.

Now if we could get a regular passenger train from KC to Topeka to Hays, with a split going to either Liberal or Colby, that might help a bit. Oops I left out the Emporia to Wichita bit. Oops I left out all of SE KS. Hmm. Route design might be a little harder than I thought.

World coal reserves might be significantly left than previously thought (Wired). Interesting concept – what if coal were not plentiful, but scarce…

The new model, created by Dave Rutledge, chair of Caltech’s engineering and applied sciences division, suggests that humans will only pull up a total — including all past mining — of 662 billion tons of coal out of the Earth. The best previous estimate, from the World Energy Council, says that the world has almost 850 billion tons of coal still left to be mined…

… Rutledge argues that governments are terrible at estimating their own fossil fuel reserves. He developed his new model by looking back at historical examples of fossil fuel exhaustion. For example, British coal production fell precipitously form its 1913 peak. American oil production famously peaked in 1970, as controversially predicted by King Hubbert. Both countries had heartily overestimated their reserves.

It was from manipulating the data from the previous peaks that Rutledge developed his new model, based on fitting curves to the cumulative production of a region. He says that they provide much more stable estimates than other techniques and are much more accurate than those made by individual countries.

“The record of geological estimates made by governments for their fossil fuel estimates is really horrible,” Rutledge said during a press conference at the American Geological Union annual meeting. “And the estimates tend to be quite high. They over-predict future coal production.”

More specifically, Rutledge says that big surveys of natural resources underestimate the difficulty and expense of getting to the coal reserves of the world. And that’s assuming that the countries have at least tried to offer a real estimate to the international community. China, for example, has only submitted two estimates of its coal reserves to the World Energy Council — and they were wildly different.

“The Chinese are interested in producing coal, not figuring out how much they have,” Rutledge said. “That much is obvious.”

The National Research Council’s Committee on Coal Research, Technology, and Resource Assessments to Inform Energy Policy actually agrees with many of Rutledge’s criticisms, while continuing to maintain far sunnier estimates of the recoverable stocks of American coal.

— Maril Hazlett, www.climateandenergy.org