I thought I would blog this because, at a get-together of friends recently, nobody had even heard of "peak coal". Most people seem to feel that supplies of coal in N. America are unlimited. However, concerns about the supply were raised as far back as 1865, by William Stanley Jevons, the originator of the economic theory of marginal utility.
Quote from the Wikipedia article, retrieved Jan. 8, 2011 (references are provided).
"Research in 2009 by the University of Newcastle in Australia concluded that global coal production could peak sometime between 2010 and 2048. Global coal reserve data is generally of poor quality and is often biased towards the high side. Collective projections generally predict that global peak coal production may occur sometime around 2025 at 30 percent above current production in the worst case scenario, depending on future coal production rates."
Peak coal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - as of 11 Nov., 2010.
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