China, Coal, and Absolutely Nothing About the Bakken

Don sent me this article. He said to look at the comments regarding electric usage. I did. That impressed me, but so did the picture. It appears the road leading to the bottom of the coal pit is more than a mile long. China burns 17 of these giant coal pits every year.

China's coal imports were up nearly 70% over last year for the first four months of the year.

70%.

[You know, this is getting awful close to 100% which means they would have doubled their imports year-over-year. So either they front-loaded their imports or their coal usage is increasing beyond imagination. I have to think some of the increase was due to front-loading the annual imports.]

But I digress. What does all that coal get you?

In China: 4.7 trillion KWH, slightly more than what the US used last year. That averages out to about 380 watts per Chinese, about equal to using a light bulb and a computer at the same time, let alone anything else.

Another interesting comment from the link:

China consumes nearly 4 billion tons of coal a year. In energy equivalence one ton of coal equals to 4 barrels of oil. To replace the coal demand China will need 44M extra barrels of oil a day, on top of the 12M barrels of oil a day China is already consuming. That total of 56M barrels of oil a day is way beyond what the world can supply, with 85M barrels a day global oil production and USA alone consumes 21M barrels a day.