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Title: Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage by Kenneth S. Deffeyes ISBN: 0-691-09086-6 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 October, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.74 (35 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The wolf is at the door
Comment: Deffeyes hits the nail on the head when he clearly details what petroleum industry insiders already know - it's not "if" global oil production will peak, it's "when." After years of warning about the imminent demise of cheap oil supplies, experts are now splitting hairs about whether or not inexpensive oil production will peak in this decade or the next. The author's easy-going, occasionally humorous prose makes the bad news easier to take, but either way, a serious global oil crisis is looming on the horizon.
Deffeyes energizes his readers by sweeping us easily through the denser strata of the complexities and developmental progress that built "Big Oil," but he also warns of relying on technology to save us in the future. Unlike many technological optimists, this life-long veteran of the industry concludes that new innovations like gas hydrates, deep-water drilling, and coal bed methane are unlikely to replace once-abundant petroleum in ease of use, production, and versatility. The Era of Carbon Man is ending.
A no-nonsense oilman blessed with a sense of humor, Deffeyes deftly boils his message down to the quick. Easily-produced petroleum is reaching its nadir, and although they are clean and renewable, energy systems like geothermal, wind and solar power won't solve our energy needs overnight. "Hubbert's Peak" represents an important aspect of the energy crisis, but it is only one factor in this multi-faceted problem that includes biosphere degradation, global warming, per-capita energy decline, and a science/industry community intolerant of new approaches to energy technology research and development. An exciting new book by the Alternative Energy Institute, Inc., "Turning the Corner: Energy Solutions for the 21st Century," addresses all of the components associated with the energy dilemma and is also available on Amazon.com.
Anyone who is concerned about what world citizens, politicians, and industry in the United States and international community must do to ensure a smooth transition from dependence on dangerous and polluting forms of energy to a more vital and healthier world, needs to read these books. Future generations rely on the decisions we make today.
Rating: 5
Summary: Enjoy that gas-guzzler while you can
Comment: Kenneth Deffeyes is no tree-hugging Green doomsayer, reflexively warning of yet another eco-catastrophe. He's a hard-headed, clear-thinking, practical-minded oil geologist with a long career in the oil industry. So when he announces that world oil prediction is going to peak within a very few years (2004-1008) and then start an inevitable decline, you sit up and listen.
Deffeyes bases his prediction on an improved version of the work of the legendary M. King Hubbert, another Shell geologist, who predicted in 1956 that United States oil production would peak and start to decline in the early 1970s. Although Hubbert was decried as a doomsayer, he proved to be exactly right. Of course, that's one of the reasons that the U.S. is so dependent on foreign oil, which in turn is one of the reasons that we are so deeply entangled in the morass of the Middle East.
Deffeyes details his sobering prediction clearly, cleanly and convincingly. Along the way he rewards the reader with a wry insider's guide to the history of oil, oil geology and the oil industry. He doesn't waste a word. I can't remember when I learned more per page than I did reading _Hubbert's Peak_.
If Deffeyes is right, the implications are enormous. Anyone who wants to know what's really going to happen in the engine room of our economy should read this book.
Robert E. Adler
Author of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation (Wiley, 2002)
Rating: 5
Summary: Only one more oil crisis, but it'll be a doozy
Comment: While millions of environmentally concerned Americans are ready to vilify on reflex what Molly Ivins flippantly dubs "the oil bidness," Kenneth Deffeyes thinks of the petroleum fields as a place of high spirits and high romance. But, having spent half his life working for Shell, and half of it training later generations of fossil fuel hunters, he is here to break the bad news to us gently. And the news is, the party's over. The days of derring-do among the derricks are just about done.
Thirty years ago, U.S. oil production peaked, and has been declining ever since. Shortly, world oil production will hit the same peak, and begin to decline. That doesn't mean there will be no oil left; thirty years after hitting its own peak, the U.S. is still the second largest oil producer in the world. But it does mean that demand will outstrip supply, and that means the economic dislocations of the late 70s - the spiking prices, the long gas lines, the deep recession - will become permanent. Eventually, other sources of energy, both renewables and plentiful fossil fuels like natural gas, will fill in the breach. But it will be a long and painful process, requiring a ton of capital investments in research and in infrastructure that a suddenly poorer first world will be ill able to afford.
"Shortly", Deffeyes argues, means in one to six years, and probably in the early part of that range. One can quibble with some of his arguments for that timing. With luck, he acknowledges, there may be one significant set of oil fields yet to be discovered, in the South China Sea (unexplored so far because the competing jurisdictions of the several nearby island nations have made contracts hard to nail down.) And I don't think he's given sufficient weight to the fact that all the oil recovery in the Middle East is still "primary", using old-fashioned pumping technology. But if all the quibbles are granted, it only affords the world economy another five or ten years of grace.
So, if Deffeyes is wrong, the time to start making those massive investments and changes is today. If he is right, the time to start making them is ten years ago, and all we can accomplish by swift action is to make the period of intense pain a decade or two shorter. Though Professor Deffeyes isn't political enough or impolite enough to say so, Clinton (for all his green talk) failed to provide any leadership to reduce our dependence on petroleum. And his successor, of course, is providing energetic leadership, but all of it is geared to marching us all double-time into still more rapid consumption of what little oil is left. History will remember neither President Slick, nor President Oil Slick, any more kindly than it now remembers Herbert Hoover for fiddling while the fuse that would set off the Great Depression burned.
The book is an easy read, short and set in a conversational style that permits the reader to glide through the more technical portions if so inclined. The technical details and the mathematical arguments could be tighter, and the folksiness, which would be delightful in a lecture room, is occasionally a bit much on the written page. For those reasons, it would be easy to give the book only four stars. But those faults are inseparable from the book's virtues. They're compromises Deffeyes chose to make in order to be accessible to a wide audience, and his book deserves to reach one.
If environmentalists take Deffeyes' message seriously,they'll realize that we will soon be so starved for oil that ANWAR is certain to be plundered, and that nuclear plants are certain to sprout across the landscape like, well, like mushrooms. If Deffeyes is on or near target, nothing can prevent those developments. Greens today should be using ANWAR and an expanded nuclear industry as bargaining chips, to be traded for strict CAFE standards, investment in renewable technologies, non-industry oversight of nuclear safety, and (since the near term alternative will be coal) investment in natural gas pipeline infrastructure.
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Title: The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies by Richard Heinberg ISBN: 0865714827 Publisher: New Society Pub Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict With a New Introduction by the Author by Michael T. Klare ISBN: 0805055762 Publisher: Owl Books Pub. Date: 13 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil by David Goodstein ISBN: 0393058573 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: February, 2004 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: The Color of Oil : The History, the Money and the Politics of the World's Biggest Business by Michael Economides, Ronald Oligney, Armando Izquierdo, Micheal Economides ISBN: 0967724805 Publisher: Round Oak Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 March, 2000 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: PRIZE : THE EPIC QUEST FOR OIL, MONEY & POWER by Daniel Yergin ISBN: 0671799320 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1993 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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