December 2008The new model, created by Dave Rutledge, chair of...

December 2008

The new model, created by Dave Rutledge, chair of Caltechs engineering and applied sciences division, suggests that humans will only pull up a total including all past mining of 662 billion tons of coal out of the Earth. The best previous estimate, from the World Energy Council, says that the world has almost 850 billion tons of coal still left to be mined.


http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/world-coal-rese/

It appears fairly obvious that noone has a clue as to how much coal there really is out there...