Before I lose all you Peak Oil believers, let me explain why I bought this book, and why everyone who is trying to convince others about the serious nature of peak oil should read it too.
This new 2005 book will be cited by anyone trying to refute stories of a coming energy shortage to dismiss the peak oil case. Media reporters, politicians, CEOs, business leaders, economists, students, and non technical lay people; in fact all those who promote and have a stake in continued economic growth that requires unending growth in energy use and available supply, will seize on this well written book. They will use it to show that those people promoting the story of a coming fuel shortage just don’t understand the history and nature of energy and they are yet again promoting wrong ideas.
In order to counter this Cornucopian view of the future and those people who will use this book to prove their case, you need to know their arguments. I will attempt to a summarize a few of them to give you their logic, especially since they say "it is all about logic-and logic gates".
PLEASE don’t shoot the messenger!
Many of the chapters give a very good history and details of the development of mankind’s use of energy, even including excellent discussions of the first and second laws of thermodynamics in lay terms. This book is filled with facts and statistics. It will cause you to reexamine your views about energy. It actually makes a great case for why we have such a productive society today built on energy and tells how we got here. It says that, not only is more and more energy useful and good, it is essential for growth (true!) and endless growth in energy supply and use is possible forever. However the book totally fails in at the end to make the case to me that this wonderful world will happen in time. In order to believe them, you have to extrapolate the past history of energy into the future and assume inventions and miracles will be here next year.
Start with the author’s assertion “supplies of energy are unlimited”. If you look at the Middle Ages for example, coal, oil, uranium, and even the knowledge of the power of steam all existed then. What was lacking was the technical understanding and the invention of key “logic” controls on how to build devices to utilize these energy sources to provide power for productive work. James Watt’s invention of the steam engine was really the “logic” of controlling the process- the ingenious valves that control the Carnot cycle.
The history of man is using ever more complicated and compact machines, to use increasingly concentrated fuels, to create increasing power density and productivity- from wood to coal to oil to uranium. The end is pure energy as electricity and high quality photons in fiber optic cables. People promoting solar and wind energy may be interested in the analysis of why starting with diffuse, low concentrated energy sources like sunlight and wind, it takes such expensive amounts of PV solar cells and wind turbines to equal a nuclear reactor which uses a concentrated energy source. Uranium 235 can be recovered from uranium ore and enriched using high quality laser light. Energy plus logic begets even more energy is the message. Oceans of deuterium await the fusion reactor.
One other example will illustrate the approach. The modern laser used in eye surgery takes about 6600 units of primary fuel to go through multiple conversions making higher and higher quality electricity and to ultimately get 100 units of high quality photons of laser light energy. The cost of this energy is extremely small compared with the cost of the intellectual property and equipment needed to get results. The cost of power for laser eye surgery is insignificant. The diffuse photons of the sun can’t do the job. Mankind finds expensive laser photons worth the cost. I could add so does everyone with a DVD player which uses a laser; not many worry about the power to run it.
One other example I found interesting affects those who propose going back to the “Amish” lifestyle. In 1910, 27 % of productive farmland was used to grow feed for horses. The description of the “carbohydrate” based economy may make the case that society will indeed collapse without oil, but that is not the objective here. They argue that oil allows using this land to be used for expanded production of human food. They go on to argue that reduction of land for horses and wood burning has actually reversed the destruction of trees in recent decades leading to more tree plantings, that are now removing more CO2 from the air than oil burning vehicles add to the air. REALLY? You better be prepared for the argument! When the rain forest peoples get super cheap- abundant electric power they too will be able to replant all those trees. WOW!
Where the book totally failed me at the end, was the argument that high tech robots roaming the deep oceans will find all the oil we need in the remaining huge oil reserves, just by using high tech seismic data to precisely hit every little pocket of oil remaining, regardless of depth. It is all written using just a few pages and will convince no one who knows the peak oil story. However, the carefully crafted language will convince many that highly intelligent technology can easily solve the growing oil needs well into the era of the all electric car powered from nuclear reactors (fission now-fusion later).
The chapter on the high tech electrical car made the case for me that a return of electrical powered mass transit is more likely than the author’s scenario, but this option does not come up. They did discuss the difficulties of hydrogen however.
In the end I was at first puzzled that, after the eloquent praise of higher and higher technology, they did not mention carbon nanotechnology and the promise for the buckytube fuel cells and batteries for their electric car. The did not mention Richard Smalley and his electric grid powered by the sun. Carbon nanotech fits the "technology to the rescue" story perfectly. It was then I realized this book is a subtle promotion of nuclear power and an electric future based on fission/fusion power. Solar power was dismissed in earlier chapters. Or maybe the were as ignorant of nanotechnology as they were about oil production.
I found it an interesting read, just not one that justified the title or came close to convincing me the they had an energy solution that will sustain our world for the next 50 years. At times I wondered if this was a book about comedy, I laughed so often.
Edit added:
I neglected one very good chapter that everyone who thinks better energy efficiency standards will solve our problem should read. The chapter is "The Paradox of Efficiency". I would give them more credit if they cited Jevons paradox, but they used it anyway without doing their homework. The authors show the history of energy use is one of constantly increasing efficiency in the use of energy inputs in just about every use of energy from power plants to transportation to LED bulbs. The result of this increased efficiency is to increase the wider use of the technology and to INCREASE total energy use and production of total energy, especially electricity to meet this demand. This good chapter is a lesson for those who think we can solve the coming fuels shortage by only increasing fuel mileage by hybrid cars. More hybrids, absent other constraints on demand will mean more people world wide drive cars and more total fuel will be used.
Edit note- 2: See post below for the authors' specific hypothesis on infinite oil in the chapter 11 -Infinite supply. ( Is using "Chapter 11" a Freudian slip related to bankrupcy?)
