Coal systems - A gateway to predictive assessments of coal production

Current federal and State coal assessments estimate resources in the ground, resources available for mining, and economically recoverable resources. None of these assessments predict the amount of coal that may be produced from an assessed area in the near future (???20 years). Predictive assessments of coal production would be based on an understanding of the regional coal geology (coal systems), potential demand, and knowledge of the mining history of the region. The output of the predictive assessment would be a supply curve - a probability distribution of the amount of coal expected to be produced from current and new mines during the assessment period.