PowerSwitch

http://www.bp.com/productlanding.do?cat ... Id=7044622

Interestingly the PDF of the 2009 report is a few hundred kilobytes shorter than the 2008 report -- must be the recession

Just looked at the amount of coal china's burning Nearly 3 times the US...

Staggering really all that CO2......

Is that all? China's piopulation is far more than x3 the US.

Yeah, but the big question in the USGS at the moment is what proportion of US coal reserves can actually be extracted economically. E.g.:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124414770220386457.html

China's coal reserves to production is now just 41 years

Really can't see china implementing CCS if it takes 25->33% energy to capture and store.

China's coal consumption has doubled in the last 6 years, I don't think the 41 years will happen.

Russia has large coal reserves that they are not using, about the only real source that could sustain china.

IanG wrote:Russia has large coal reserves that they are not using, about the only real source that could sustain china.

The flaw in the BP survey is that it takes reported reserves as read -- increasingly there's evidence that these figures are not just inflated (e.g. OPEC oil), but even the openly reported data could be exaggerated.

The future for coal in the USA is uncertain following an assessment by the USGS (Assessment of Coal Geology, Resources, and Reserves in the Gillette Coalfield, Powder River Basin, Wyoming, United States Geological Survey, 2008 -- http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2008/1202/). This showed that there may be less coal available in the USA than previously thought, and recent studies suggest that only a small fraction of the USA's coal reserves are economically viable, even with the recently high world prices. (U.S. Foresees a Thinner Cushion of Coal, Rebecca Smith, Wall Street Journal, Monday 8th June 2009 -- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124414770220386457.html).

If the USA were to become a coal importer that would put pressure on the global availability of coal.