How is coal formed?

Discover how your laptop is powered by plants that died before the dinosaurs

When will Earth’s coal run out? No one knows exactly when we’ll run out of coal, but its use has skyrocketed during the last 200 years. We used a whopping 6.8 billion tons – that’s the approximate weight of 4 billion cars – in 2009 alone. Around 860 billion tons of coal remains unmined and major coal producers estimate supplies will last around 130 years at current rates. Despite this estimate we can’t be sure that coal won’t run out sooner, as the world’s remaining coal may turn out to be hard to reach or bad quality. Worse still, we’re uncertain how much coal is buried. India, for example, overestimated its coal reserves by 36 billion tons in 2003. Alternatively, we may develop better sources of energy, stop using coal and never…

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How It Works Book of Incredible Earth (Digital) - 1 Issue, How It Works Book Of Incredible Earth 6th Edition

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