If the Borg Skipped Around in a 3-Trillion-Ton Cube of Coal...(1913)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post   Overall Post 5133

This is an arresting and somewhat intimidating (1913) image¹--a gigantic Borg-like cube of all of the Earth's coal. It was made to show the vastness of the U.S. coal reserves, and that no matter how much was burned, that there was an absolutely overwhelming quantity still remaining.  The larger of the two cubes at the bottom of the Megacube indicates the amount of coal extracted and used through the course of human activity in what would become the United States, and the block to its left is total production for the year 1913. The thing is that the current numbers pretty must jibe with those of 1913, or at least they do in scale.  The total coal reserve now stands at 254 billion short tons compared to 3.5 trillion in 1913, while the extraction in 2019² was 728 million compared to about 500 million in 1913.  Overall there's a much wider population and usage base for coal now than in 1913 by about 45%, meaning there's much less demand for coal as an energy source. I don't know offhand about the discrepancy between the original 1913 figure for total reserves now might but I'm pretty sure that we didn't gobble up 3 trillion tons of the stuff.  Probably it was just an inaccurate guesstimate, as we'd have to had used 30 billion tons of coal every year for 100 years to account for the difference of reserve and extraction.  Anyway, it is a great image and artistic display of quantitative data.  

Notes:

1. R.H. Byrd "Fuel Production in the Unites States, Present Consumption and Future Supply" July 5, 1913, Scientific American, page 10.  

2. Current data pulled from US EIA and Statistical Review of World Energy (British Petroleum) websites.