Unfortunately, we cannot afford to pull all of the fossil fuels out of the ground.
There are trillions of barrels of unconventional oil shale (confusingly, not the same as shale oil) in the Green River formation in Wyoming/Colorado alone. If it was all extracted and burned and put into the atmosphere (assuming none makes it as ocean acidification, etc), it'd raise the CO2 level from the current 400ppm (about 3 trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere right now) to 500ppm. Just a single formation.
And there's 5 trillion tons of coal in Alaska, equivalent to about 15 trillion tons of CO2. Even if just half of that made it into the atmosphere (the other half going to ocean acidification, weathering, and biomass), we'd have something like 1400ppm in the atmosphere, which is a very stuffy room. And that's just one state. Assume Siberia and Canada has just as much or more.
I think if we extracted every last bit of fossil fuels in the ground, we'd have a CO2 level on the order of 10,000ppm and will have measurably reduced oxygen levels as well.
Right. Only about 1 trillion in provenreserves, a number which often increases over time due to technology and economics and exploration.
I was discussing how much actual coal is there. Coal resources, which is a (relatively) fixed number.
The fellow I was responding to was talking about extracting all the oil and gas from the ground (not just that which is today known with high certainty and both technically and economically viable).
In other words, technology and economics has improved access to fossil fuels faster than we can burn it.
But it's not like there was a bunch of oil added into the ground. It was there the whole time. Hence why I'm using resources: It's the ultimate limit.
We cannot rely on Peak Oil (or Peak Coal for that matter) to stop our reliance on fossil fuels and the ensuing climate change. We just keep getting better and better at extracting them. Trends in automation of mining do not bode well for the climate, either.
> Right. Only about 1 trillion in proven reserves, a number which often increases over time due to technology and economics and exploration.
I get that, but you are claiming that the unproven reserves of one portion of the US are more than five times the current proven reserves of the entire world. Where is your evidence for that?
> We cannot rely on Peak Oil (or Peak Coal for that matter) to stop our reliance on fossil fuels and the ensuing climate change.
No, we need to stop burning them. That is unrelated to extracting them except for extraction being the first step in the process.
> "The combined measured, indicated, inferred, and hypothetical coal resources in the three areas are estimated to be 5,526 billion short tons (5,012 billion metric tons), which constitutes about 87 percent of Alaska’s coal"
The amount of fossil fuel energy in the ground (if we're very clever about extracting it) is absolutely vast. Enough to provide current needs for hundreds or even thousands of years, but to cook the climate and chemically change the atmosphere to that of a stuffy room long before that.
There are trillions of barrels of unconventional oil shale (confusingly, not the same as shale oil) in the Green River formation in Wyoming/Colorado alone. If it was all extracted and burned and put into the atmosphere (assuming none makes it as ocean acidification, etc), it'd raise the CO2 level from the current 400ppm (about 3 trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere right now) to 500ppm. Just a single formation.
And there's 5 trillion tons of coal in Alaska, equivalent to about 15 trillion tons of CO2. Even if just half of that made it into the atmosphere (the other half going to ocean acidification, weathering, and biomass), we'd have something like 1400ppm in the atmosphere, which is a very stuffy room. And that's just one state. Assume Siberia and Canada has just as much or more.
I think if we extracted every last bit of fossil fuels in the ground, we'd have a CO2 level on the order of 10,000ppm and will have measurably reduced oxygen levels as well.