An M.I. T. study sees it picking up the slack as oil runs out
Ever since he presented his national energy plan in April 1977, Jimmy Carter has been arguing that coal is the fuel of the future for the U.S. The Saudi Arabia of coal, America sits atop 25% of the world's known reserves of the black rock. The President's 1977 plan called for a 75% jump in production by 1985 to 1.2 billion tons annually. Yet as of last year output had climbed to only 770 million tons, and the National Coal Association estimates that the industry will produce only 972 million tons by 1985. Now, at long last, the restoration of King Coal to its former preeminence is getting some distinguished, and badly needed, nonpartisan support.
This week the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will release a 247-page study titled Coal—Bridge to the Future. The report optimistically concludes that the fuel can supply from half to two-thirds of all the additional energy needed by the world between now and the year 2000. Moreover, the study argues that the U.S. should play the pivotal role in helping to meet this demand, which will require tripling worldwide coal production during the next 20 years.
The report is the result of an intensive 18-month global effort by energy experts, economists, business leaders and government officials in 16 different countries, ranging from Japan to Poland. Their mission: to go beyond well-known and rather dry tallies of world reserves and calculate just how much coal consumption will actually grow if worldwide petroleum production begins dropping, as expected, in the late 1980s.
Unlike an earlier M.I.T. study, Energy: Global Prospects 1985-2000, which was released in 1977 and featured a pessimistic but very accurate appraisal of world petroleum supplies, the coal report is almost uniformly upbeat. It maps out an array of broad new trade patterns likely to emerge between the industrial and developing worlds as coal moves into greater use. International trade in coal, which already exceeds $10 billion annually, should surge by anywhere from ten to 15 times during the next 20 years, with nearly 40% of all coal exports coming from the U.S. Among the major projected customers for the fuel: France, Italy and Japan.
But many tough issues must still be resolved before that rosy future arrives.
Expanded use of coal has long been blocked by the problems of mining, moving and burning it. For one thing, no one really knows what the long-range effect on the environment will be of sharply stepped up coal use in the decades ahead. Moreover, the price tag for coal development will be staggering: about $1 trillion worldwide to dig the mines and then build the necessary trains, ports and other transportation facilities. The U.S. coal industry's feisty, strike-prone, 230,000-member United Mine Workers Union, which crippled Eastern U.S. mines for 110 days during the winter of 1977-78, has also created doubts among potential customers about whether supplies would be available when needed.