Coal: Solidified Sunbeams (Planted for Humanity)

Here we have one of the most poetic descriptions of coal that you’re likely to see. It’s from a National Geographic article written in the throes of World War I and titled, “Coal—Ally of American Industry.” The picture is captioned: Beneath These Bare Rocks Lie the Solidified Sunbeams Stored by Provident Nature for Resourceful Man. Solidified Sunbeams!  In the hands of this able chronicler and evangelist of/for coal, he — like the science he loves — transforms coal into much more:

Under [Man's] touch coal becomes comfort in the home or death at the battle front; yields a corrosive acid that burns lie fire or a sweetness that makes sugar seem insipid; gives off a gas that smells like a bad egg, but is as harmless as chicken; is transformed into colors that make the rainbow envious of their brightness and variety, and into explosives the thunderbolt jealous of their power.

Dang! No wonder we use so much of it. How many other substances do you know that can make both rainbows and thunderbolts jealous? Tell you what, potassium chloride isn’t gonna do that for you.

And indeed William Joseph Showalter puts his finger right on the problem with fossil fuels: they are just too damn useful. They are energy dense — so you can do a lot of work with them – and relatively abundant — so you don’t have to pay a lot for them. Put it together and you have enormous productive power at relatively low cost.

The problem is that we have run out before. First it’s happened locally, like Pennsylvania basically running out of coal. Then it’s happened nationally, like American oil peaking in 1970. Globally, we’ve never really run out of the major fossil fuels — oil, natural gas, and coal — but it’s looking increasingly likely that we will and not in a long, long time, but soon.

Clearly, my reading — and reporting from the world’s biggest geology conference — have me thinking about the previous energy busts in history. David Rutledge, a Caltech professor ranging outside his field, came up with a new way to calculate the world’s reserves of a given resource. The shocking conclusion of his research is that we might actually pull — and burn — a lot less coal out of the ground than we previously thought. That has all kinds of implications for global warming, climate change policy, the future of the planet, the necessity of creating alternative technologies, etc. You can check out my story for Wired Science, if you want to here more about that stuff.

More importantly for my book is that he developed his method based on the history of previous energy production. He went back and looked at previous cases of resource exhaustion – whale oil, British coal, American oil (which peaked in 1970, if you hadn’t heard) — and fit curves to the data, looking for the “ultimate” amount that would ever be produced of the given resource. It turns out that using this model, which admittedly is pretty speculative, you could have predicted these previous peaks just based on how much coal or whale oil was coming out of the ground or oceans. He’s got a great set of slides that detail his methodology and provide a brief tutorial of the great busts of energy history (ppt).

It just so happened that I also began reading Petrolia, by Brian Black, which details the very first oil boom (and bust). From 1859 to 1873, the Allegheny mountains of Pennsylvania were the number 1 oil producing region in the world. Mostly because they had the petroleum market to themselves there at the beginning. What they were actually competing against was whale oil, increasingly scarce as whalers were forced to search more and more ocean to kill and eviscerate the same amount of whale, and various animal lards (I know: gross). By 1850, there was an $8 million whale oil market and a bustling trade in the stuff. Whalers would go out for three to five years to bring back a few thousand gallons of burnable oil.

In this early section of the book, Black presents some excellent evidence that earlier oil distribution systems and some lamp design innovations allowed for the rapid introduction of petroleum into the American economy. Because all these companies were playing in the same space: the light market. Something to burn to get out of the dark.  Illumination!

“Creating affordable lighting possessed the divine potential of increasing time in the day,” we read.

There is something godly about transforming geological history into human time, to taking these “solidifed sunbeams” that were “planted for humanity by a bounteous Providence in the Carboniferous Age” and turning them into the extension of human time, a few more hours allotted to each of millions of individuals.

The scale and size of the industry that arose seems totally out of step with the simple convenience that light provided.

To see them gathered at a rate of more than two million tons a day, transported hundreds of miles, and then, under the alchemy of science, transmuted into a thousand forms—heat for the fireside, light for the darkness, motion for the railroad train, power for the factory, fertility for the soil—is an illuminating lesson, showing how man, the creature of Nature, through science makes her wonderful forces his servants.

And then you run out. The year before Showalter wrote — though he probably didn’t know this — Pennsylvania anthracite coal hit its peak and has been declining ever since.

Images: National Geographic.