When Will We Run Out Of Coal Essay

When will we run out of coal? It’s by far our number one way of producing energy. It’s kept us thriving for so long, but when will we run out? What will we use after we ultimately do run out? If you haven’t guessed already, I’m talking about coal. Has anyone else done some mathematical modeling to answer these questions? Well, either way I’ve set out to find answers to these questions, and model the math that I’ve done to acquire the correct data. For me to do any modeling of any sort of math, I first required data and background information. So with the help of government run websites I came to the conclusion that coal reserves are available in almost every country worldwide. The biggest reserves in the world include the: USA, China, Russia, India, Europe, Australia, and parts of South Africa. It is important that one keeps in mind, that around the world there are many unrecoverable and undiscovered coal reserves. As of data from 2015 these are the amounts in tons of discovered, recoverable coal reserves. In the USA there is about 237 billion tons, Russia about 191 billion tons, China has 115 billion tons, Europe includes 89 billion

I came to the realization that an exponential function would be perfect to model the data, after remembering that every year there wasn’t a steady increase in consumption, and that there was a percent change. With all this in mind, I began to write my equation. I started out with a regular exponential function, also known as a geometric sequence. It looks like this: An=7,463,000(1.042)n-1.After solving for time and putting 800 billion in for An(being the limit) and I received the number 295. However, one must understand that when I used this equation (geometric sequence) I was solving for the year in which the world consumed 800 billion tons of coal all at once. That is when I understood that I needed a new