I have followed all the number of threads associated with coal, and realized there is one unanswered question in this real life game of Railroad Tycoon…what is the useful life of the Powder River Basin? A natural followup question: Are there any other comparable deposits to be exploited? And the third part of the question is…the most important are they or it close to a Class 1 carrier? I was going to research this but probably some of you already know the answers…by the way…thanks for answers on powerplants being built near coal deposits…here is an interesting report on very same subject…
The question is really, “when does the CHEAP coal run out?” There’s oodles of expensive coal in the U.S. and the rest of the world, enough in sight to last the world at current burn rates for several thousand years. And beyond that there’s some very expensive coal below the Arctic Ocean and other continental shelf areas. (Now if we could just figure out how to do “global cooling” the ocean levels would drop and we could strip-mine it. [:-,])
The cheap PRB coal runs out in about 50-80 years. After that there’s a lot of more expensive PRB coal as well as lots and lots of cheap lignite in North Dakota, Montana, and Texas, but the lignite is very low-performance coal and accordingly the transportation costs will go way up, because roughly 30-50% more must be moved to generate the same amount of energy at the power plant.
“The American Association of Petroleum Geologists, an international organization, supports continued access to the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument for petroleum and mineral exploration and development activities. There is significant potential for oil and gas on dozens of under-explored anticlines throughout the 1.9 million acres within the Monument. In addition, a high potential for large quantities of coalbed methane exists in the vast Kaiparowits coal field in the Monument resource area.”
Everyone in the West involved in energy and railroads is familiar with the infamous Kaiparowits field. It’s all off-limits now but back in the 1960s there were big plans to mine it, build power plants to burn it, and a lot of rail line to access it. I have some maps in my drawers showing all the different power plant site and rail line proposals – there were quite a few.
It would take a sea change in U.S. voters’ minds for mining to gain access to the Kaiparowits Plateau. The big issue is air quality; Kaiparowits coal would need to be burned mine-mouth, for the most part. U.S. voters decided that the cost of reduced air quality in the region was greater than the cost of more expensive electricity. Closer to home, the voters in the Four Corners states decided they didn’t need to pollute their air for the benefit of Los Angeles electric rates, and U.S. law backed them up. Wilderness area designations and water quality are other big problems facing development of the coal here.
I think it’s more likely we’ll see nuclear approved by the voters than coal from Kaiparowits. But that’s just my guess.
Interesting…I wonder if these lines to Cedar City and Brendel are still active? If Syntroleum is feasible…perhaps any objections would be moot in light of the greater public good…Utah appears to be ripe, to say the least…paradims can change pretty quickly in the light of historically rapid technological advances…looking at energy independance as a goal…if the feds would fund the now private development of Syntroleum…perhaps…problem solved…we’ll never know if we don’t try…imagine the economic boom this potentially represents for both the railroads and Utah…If I were a Class 1 I would throw some money in the R&D pot…
UP Cedar City Branch and former Rio Grande Cane Creek Branch are both active. Neither is even remotely feasible for approaching the Kaiparowits Plateau – the former has several mountain ranges and deep canyons in the way and the latter has the Colorado River Canyon and Green River Canyon in the way. Total dead ends.
I don’t know much about new technology except that it’s hard to predict. I don’t recall anyone 30 years ago predicting the advent of cell phones, e-mail, the internet and Google, laptop computers, and airfares so cheap I spend virtually every workday in a different city, all stuff that’s dramatically changed my everyday life. As for voters changing their mind about accepting more polluting of the environment in order to get cheaper electricity, a lot of people have been hoping that for a long time and are hoping still. Anything’s possible but the trend seems to be going 100% in the opposite direction.
When I first visited the PBR area, during a tour at Black Thunder Mine, they had quoted a 400 yr supply. I recall reading a more recent estimate in print of 300 yrs. Of course the pollution may be so bad at that point that there will be no one left to use the coal, but those where the numbers I’d heard. Obviously domestic burn rates will have an impact, but moreover, exports to places like China as they are industrializing will probably have a bigger impact.
So RR’s have their “coal-fix” in the west for the rest of my lifetime and then some.
The “Then What” that I’ve wondered about is the recent flood of Chinese, Indian and other asian imports in the last 5 yrs. Spend any time along the BNSF transcon or hi-line and those 2 routes are absolutely dominated by intact international containers moving inland from the ports of Long Beach / LA and Seattle. What the heck did BNSF do before this traffic? … and as economics change, environmental laws change, worker laws change oversees, etc, how long can BNSF and UP for that matter, rely on the current 8-10% year over year growth trends in international intermodal, that they’ve enjoyed for the last 5 yrs?
Great discussion on a couple of points. Personally, I think (and granted my opinion is not that valuable) that there is plenty of fossil energy…it is as Mr. Hadid mentioned, how much longer will the cheaper energy be available.
The green team seems to be gaining some momentum lately, not sure if that is due to the 2006 elections or what, but now big business is even talking of green solutions. Personally, I am not sold yet on the global warming issue. It is a very nice political point for certain ex Vice Presidents who burn $500 per month of natural gas just to heat their pool house! Hmmm.
Great point about the 8-10% growth rates on imported Asian goods. How long will this last? What really bothers me is that we have discarded our manufacturing, except for certain items.
Did you catch the news last week that the Chinese are considering selling their vast US Treasury holdings? Uh oh. Can you say “higher interest rates”?
“One of the most productive coalbed methane regions is the Powder River Basin, the semiarid region in Wyoming and Montana that is the single largest source of low-sulfur coal in the United States. It’s a landscape that’s covered with sagebrush and pocked with surface mines. One estimate puts the total coal resource in the area at some 800 billion tons. Well more than 300 million tons are mined there annually, enough to fill 8,000 railway cars each day.”
In 2003… 21% Coal + 14% Intermodal = 35% of traffic. These are probably higher numbers now.
What drew my curiousity was the timeline to when production would peak…demands on the aquifer may or may not impact the lifespan of this traffic generator. Should Asia run into a geopolitical problem, railroads would certainly experience a rapid decline in revenue. A two trick pony? As far as Asia, figures show components exported-finished goods return by import. This is the fulcrum all this balances on…
There are currently seven major West Coast ports in the U.S. They are, from north to south, Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, San Francisco/Oakland, Port Hueneme, Los Angeles/Long Beach and San Diego. Of these, the Los Angeles/Long Beach port complex is the busiest, handling roughly 14.4 million 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs: units of measure equivalent to a 20-foot by 8-foot by 8-foot shipping container) in 2005. To give you an idea of the size of the West Coast ports, the Port of Los Angeles encompasses 7,500 acres and 43 miles of waterfront.
Here is a chilling report…slightly OT but paints the underpinning of our economy…which appears to be made of paper…check out the employment graph…Somehow I see Ross Perot considered a self indulgent crank with his charts and graphs thumbtacked to every square inch of wall space “I told em so! I told em so! Ha…!”
Your reference to Railroad Tycoon in the context of PRB coal brings back some memories of a particular Western USA game map I encountered many years ago when playing the original version of Railroad Tycoon. It had something like 20 to 30 coal mines all in one spot somewhere in the Rockies and I had to build two terminal sized stations (the largest kind the game allowed) with adjacent service areas, and each with double track lines just to haul all the coal out. I set up 4 or 5 unit trains of maximum length with a nice long haul to some receiver in the midwest. The coal mine cluster surely was an aberration in the programming since I had never seen anything quite like it since, but it sure made for a fun game to play.
