Book Notes: Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert’s Peak
Review and Notes on Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert’s Peak
Kenneth Deffeyes, 2005
Read August 2006
Deffeyes is a geologist at Princeton. He’s one of the more public peak-oil figures, and in the book predicts that oil will peak around 2005. Sort of a sequel to Hubbert's Peak : The Impending World Oil Shortage, which I haven’t read. Kind of a scattershot book, but has decent technical information. Concentrates more on the physical/geological aspects of discovery and extraction than trying to predict the future, although there is some of the latter. I don’t have much to say about the details since nothing really stood out.
Synopsis
[All opinions are the author’s.]
Chapter 2: Where oil came from – again, physical/geological aspects of discovery and the nature of oil fields.
Chapter 3: The Hubbert method – gives an accessible description of Hubbert’s modelling. But I’m not impressed by the physical intuition behind the model; it’s just a curve-fit (if a compelling one).
Chapters on
natural gas
coal
tar sands – good description of the issues here,
Oil shale – he’s fairly pessimistic here. Two problems: water is required; not good in the American desert, and the extraction process actually expands the rock. So there needs to be some way to consume the rock in some saleable byproduct.
Uranium
Hydrogen
Chapter 10: “The Big Picture”. One interesting comment, that the idea of adjusting oil prices for inflation is goofy, since it was rising oil prices that caused some of that inflation.
His basic prediction is that we will have a hard five years or so until we can stabilize with other methods (oil sources or nuclear/coal/whatever), and research has time to pay off. He doesn’t go into what will be hard about those years. A discouraging note: as per tar sands and oil shale – the oil companies have been working on these issues for years, with disappointing results. We shouldn’t assume that the answers will be had for the taking.
The short-term solutions he proposes are all along the lines of improved efficiency: colocating coal mining and generation plants; finding better byproducts; using nuclear power to help process oil sands.
No discussion of solar and wind. The author explains that he is not an expert in those areas. Makes sense, but also makes for an incomplete book.
Kenneth Deffeyes, 2005
Read August 2006
Deffeyes is a geologist at Princeton. He’s one of the more public peak-oil figures, and in the book predicts that oil will peak around 2005. Sort of a sequel to Hubbert's Peak : The Impending World Oil Shortage, which I haven’t read. Kind of a scattershot book, but has decent technical information. Concentrates more on the physical/geological aspects of discovery and extraction than trying to predict the future, although there is some of the latter. I don’t have much to say about the details since nothing really stood out.
Synopsis
[All opinions are the author’s.]
Chapter 2: Where oil came from – again, physical/geological aspects of discovery and the nature of oil fields.
Chapter 3: The Hubbert method – gives an accessible description of Hubbert’s modelling. But I’m not impressed by the physical intuition behind the model; it’s just a curve-fit (if a compelling one).
Chapters on
natural gas
coal
tar sands – good description of the issues here,
Oil shale – he’s fairly pessimistic here. Two problems: water is required; not good in the American desert, and the extraction process actually expands the rock. So there needs to be some way to consume the rock in some saleable byproduct.
Uranium
Hydrogen
Chapter 10: “The Big Picture”. One interesting comment, that the idea of adjusting oil prices for inflation is goofy, since it was rising oil prices that caused some of that inflation.
His basic prediction is that we will have a hard five years or so until we can stabilize with other methods (oil sources or nuclear/coal/whatever), and research has time to pay off. He doesn’t go into what will be hard about those years. A discouraging note: as per tar sands and oil shale – the oil companies have been working on these issues for years, with disappointing results. We shouldn’t assume that the answers will be had for the taking.
The short-term solutions he proposes are all along the lines of improved efficiency: colocating coal mining and generation plants; finding better byproducts; using nuclear power to help process oil sands.
No discussion of solar and wind. The author explains that he is not an expert in those areas. Makes sense, but also makes for an incomplete book.
posted by Jim at
9:28 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home