| The World Coal Study (WOCOL) has been an international project involving over 80 people from 16 major coal-using and coal- producing countries. This is our Final Report: the product of 18 months of intensive work. WOCOL came into being as a result of my belief that there was an urgent need to examine the role that coal might play in meeting world energy needs during the next 20 years. Such a choice is being forced upon us. Oil from OPEC countries can no longer be relied upon to provide expanding supplies of energy, even with rapidly rising prices. Neither can nuclear energy be planned on for rapid expansion worldwide until present uncertainties about it are resolved. Yet the world's energy needs will continue to grow, even with vigorous energy conservation programs and with optimistic rates of expansion in the use of solar energy. Coal already supplies 25 percent of the world's energy, its reserves are vast, and it is relatively inexpensive. But no major attempt has previously been made to examine the needs for coal on aglobal scale, to match requirements of users with potential capacitiesof producers, to look at the markets coal might fill, or to examine theobstacles to a rapid expansion in coal use and how they might beovercome. This experiment in international collaboration in WOCOLfollows directly from the Workshop on Alternative Energy Strategies(WAES), which I directed. In WAES we concluded, in our reportpublished in early 1977,1 that the world might find its oil suppliesbeing constrained by limitations on exports from OPEC countries atsome time during the 1980s. This report was generally regarded atthe time as being too pessimistic. In fact, it proved to be optimisticit is now clear that we are already in that position in 1980. WAES assembled a group of people who could engage in free-ranging discussion and who worked hard together and reached agree-ment on a plausible range of global energy futures. These peoplecame from key positions in governments and private and public orga-1. ENERGY: Global Prospects 1985-2000 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977). |
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