There is no looming shortage of coal. The U.S. coal exports are at the highest they've been since the early 1990's. China and India have insatiable demand for coal. It's estimated the U.S. alone has over a 200-year supply at current mining rates.

While coal use is on the decline here as utilities retire old coal-fired power plants and replace them with ones that run on natural gas, coal use in India and China is on the rise. Chine fires up a new coal-fired power plant every two weeks.

U.S. exports will continue to rise, and coal mining here will continue to increase.

Dan Snyder

Director of Technical Operations

Posted on July 6, 2011

Wikipedia's not the best source, but 2 Wikipedia articles confirm David's statements. Worldwide coal reserves:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_by_country

Compared to yearly production / consumption:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_production

There is no shortage of coal anywhere in the world. And in a nice nod to world stability, the countries that use the most of it (US, Russia, China, India) also have the most of it, so it is unlikely there will be any international squabbles over coal any time soon.

If anyone can solve the possible myth of "clean coal", then that person would become extremely rich and general energy concerns would drop for many years or decades.

There is an extremely abundant worldwide supply of coal, but current methods have the burning of coal leave a significant environmental impact.

Andrew McKillop

Consultant / Author

Posted on July 7, 2011

I recommend you get hold of the Energy Watch Group report COAL: RESOURCES AND FUTURE PRODUCTION (Report No EWG 1/07) and then we can talk about this subject

Briefly world coal suffers all the problems driving up oil prices, specially production and transport infrastructures, not many persons knowing that world oil is losing about 1.4 million barrels a day in transport, break of bulk, evaporation and spillage, and world coal loses at least 75 million tons a year