Peak coal

However, since the increasing global efforts to limit climate change, peak coal has been driven by demand.

[3] This is due in large part to the rapid expansion of natural gas and renewable energy.

[3] Coal consumption is declining in the United States and Europe, as well as developed economies in Asia.

Partly due to the fall in cost of LPG and renewables peak consumption is forecast for the 2020s,[20] or 2030.

[23] US coal extraction peaked during World War I, then declined sharply during the depression years of the 1930s.

[22] Then coal extraction revived, and was on a nearly continual increasing trend from 1962 to 2008, exceeding the previous peaks.

Although the tonnage of coal mined in the United States reached its latest peak in 2008, the peak in terms of coal energy content occurred in 1998, at 598 Millions of metric tons of oil equivalent (Mtoe); by 2005 this had fallen to 576 Mtoe, or about 4% lower.

It is responsible for almost 40% of global coal exports worldwide, and much of its current electricity is generated from coal-fired power stations.

Groups such as the Australian Greens, suggest that coal be left in the ground to avoid its potential combustion either in Australia or in importer nations.

[28] Germany hit peak hard coal extraction in 1958 at 150 million tons.

[28] Total coal extraction peaked in 1985 at 578 million short tons, declined sharply in the early 1990s following German reunification, and has been nearly steady since 1999.

[35] In 2010, Tadeusz Patzek (chairman of the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin) and Greg Croft, predicted that coal production would peak in 2011 or shortly thereafter, and decline so quickly as to nearly eliminate the contribution of coal to climate change.

In 2011 the US Energy Information Administration projected world coal consumption to increase through 2035.

[44] According to M. King Hubbert's Hubbert peak theory, peak coal is the point at which the maximum global coal production rate is reached, after which, according to the theory, the rate of production will enter a terminal decline.

Coal is a fossil fuel formed from plant matter over the course of millions of years.

Hubbert noted that United States coal extraction grew exponentially at a steady 6.6% per year from 1850 to 1910.

He theorized that extraction rate plotted versus time would show a bell-shaped curve, declining as rapidly as it had risen.

By this method the estimated ultimate recovery results in a stable fit for active coal regions.