Alternative sources of energy

A central point, made eloquently in A Crude Awakening, is that we need an alternative source of energy to replace oil. 

Although it fails to report it, coal resources are also finite.  Two recent industry studies have suggested that ‘peak coal’ will be reached in around 15 years, although again, as the price rises there is a lot more coal that may become economic.  For example the whole of the Sydney Basin is underlain by coal. There are sub-economic coal seams visible at Katoomba and coal was even mined at Balmain, in the middle of Sydney, from 1897 to 1931. The mine was the deepest ever worked in Australia and until the early 1950’s still provided methane for the Sydney gas supply.  In the 1890’s good coal, in ten foot seams, was also found under possible mine sites at Cremorne and Neutral Bay.

Unless we find an abundant alternative energy source by the time we reach peak coal we really will be in trouble.  But will civilisation, as we know it, collapse?  Some people will think it has already if we have to start mining coal at Balmain or Neutral Bay.

We will certainly be unable to supply the projected human population with food and this will be ‘rectified’ by increasing famine in third world countries. 

It is not stated, but we might read between the lines, that the powerful may even want to return to some form of low-paid slave or indentured labour to maintain their lifestyles.  Others might claim that this is already happening in the sweat shops of the third world. 

But in many ways a lot of this is old news.

We have known that oil is bound to run out since the early 1970s and the usual answer to this problem has been to suggest that replacement energy will come from coal, nuclear or (latterly) solar sources.  When I worked for British Steel in the mid 1970’s our ‘Energy Futures’ strategy anticipated both oil and coal prices rising very steeply as resources were depleted.  It proposed hydrogen as the transport fuel of the future and as a reduction agent (replacing coke) for iron manufacture. The hydrogen would be generated from water using nuclear power.  This was called ‘nuclear steelmaking’.

The NSW Department I worked for in the early 1980s commissioned a report into coal chemicals that included its possible conversion to petrol.  This reported that the coal to petrol conversion process is well proven, having operated sub-commercially in South Africa for many years, supported by the Apartheid trade embargoes and the use of cheap coal and labour.  It also revealed that the energy efficiency of this process is low, the costs high and a great deal of fresh water is consumed.  Gasification of coal may be a better option.  Nevertheless, a web search suggests that a number of these plants are on the drawing board again.

Low energy efficiency in this case translates to increased carbon dioxide production, increased water use and increased and water pollution, in addition to larger coal mines and general resource waste.

The most efficient way of using coal as a source of general energy supply remains to burn it in large relatively efficient stationery power stations to generate electricity. 

The report also concluded that coal has a wide range of industrial uses and could be used as feedstock for plastic and other petroleum based products if the cost of petroleum becomes uncompetitive. 

Apart from generating electricity the main use of coal today is in iron making (the feedstock for steel manufacture) where it forms both an energy source and the reducing agent.  Smaller but still important uses include other metallurgical reduction and the manufacture of cement.  In some of these industries natural gas can be substituted for coal or vice versa.