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by njarboe 3263 days ago
There is still an amazing amount of coal in the ground. Check out the Powder River Basin in the US which, for one example.
2 comments

There's a lot of it there, but it's hard to extract without modern technology. There's a little peat (arguably the most accessible type of high-energy fuel) left in the British Isles and Finland, but coal is requiring progressively more and more modern effort to extract.
While true, it's also crazy expensive to extract.
Not really. Wikipedia says that the USGS extimates that "At a price of $60/ton, roughly half (48%) of the coal is economic to produce." Current prices are near $10 a ton so only highly mechanized shallow strip mining techniques are profitable. Coal is about as valuable as other bulk earth products like sand and gravel. 19th century techniques could easily mine most of this coal. It is shipping, not extraction, that determines the price of coal at a given point on Earth. Civilization might need to restart near the mines, but there are still many of those places left.

Oil on the other hand. That might be a problem.