Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage [Hardcover]

If you haven't yet honored your New Year's resolution to read at least one book about Petroleum Geology, the time to stop procrastinating is nigh. A substantial portion of Hubbert's Peak, The Impending World Oil Shortage is devoted to this arcane subject, and author Kenneth S. Deffeyes manages to impart a great deal of fascinating information without inflicting too much pain. For the lay reviewer expecting a heavy slog, this book comes as a delightful surprise.
Deffeyes, who started out as a working petroleum geologist and later taught Geology at Princeton University, sets out his most important thesis at the start of his book: World oil production is likely to peak in this decade, sometime between the years 2004-2008. A major crisis will then ensue, with "chaos in the oil industry, in governments and in national economies." Though he would be happy to be proved wrong, Deffeyes favors the earlier date and says it would take "a lot of unexpectedly good news to postpone the peak to 2010." In the meantime, we ought to be preparing for the shock through conservation measures and by developing alternative energy sources. So far, politician, executive and citizen alike have managed to ignore the issue altogether.
Deffeyes' prediction is based on the work of American geophysicist M. King Hubbert. In 1956, Hubbert forecast that U.S. domestic oil production would peak in the early 1970s. This prophetic analysis was confirmed in the spring of 1971, and the U.S. domestic oil industry has been producing at full capacity ever since. In Hubbert's Peak, Deffeyes shows how he and other professionals have applied the same techniques to world oil supplies in order to arrive at the impending global production peak.
Though he likens the ensuing scenario to the opening scenes from a horror movie, Deffeyes insists that his readers make up their own minds. He then proceeds to devote well over a hundred pages to a series of fairly technical expositions on everything from how oil is formed and found, to how it is produced, marketed and used. Learning about rock formations, oil windows and drill bits may not seem like light summer reading fare, but the dire warnings contained in Deffeyes' first chapter have wonderfully concentrated the mind. The author helps his readers along by including a generous sprinkling of homespun anecdotes, jokes and asides which all help to keep the pages turning at a rapid clip.
There is a method to this madness. The oil companies have been pursuing their profits and perfecting their techniques for several generations now. Geologists have waded along every river and tramped up every valley in the world. The only major oil "province" that hasn't been explored is the South China Sea, and Deffeyes doesn't think that's likely to be the next Saudi Arabia. He is trying to persuade doubters that they shouldn't count on any easy reprieves: "there is little expectation that something dramatic will come riding to the rescue as world oil production starts to decline."
Declining production does not mean that oil will simply disappear overnight. What he expects in the very near future is a bidding war that will send oil and other energy prices through the roof. If this means that SUVs are quickly cleared off the roads or that we all have to get better at turning off the light switches, things might not be so bad. When we consider problems like urban smog and global warming, it actually sounds like rather good news.
Yet at several points Deffeyes discusses the fact that oil and other fossil fuels (like natural gas) are used for more than just energy. The "petrochemical industry" provides you with a lot more than the gasoline in your tank. He suspects that our descendants will be aghast at the notion that we used to just burn this precious resource!
If we recall Vaclav Smil's recognition that intensive agriculture is heavily dependent on inputs of fossil fuels, one can be excused for beginning to feel distinctly uneasy. When Deffeyes describes the process of making ammonia (for nitrogen fertilizer) by combining atmospheric nitrogen with the hydrogen molecules in natural gas, uneasiness is transformed into outright alarm. It is almost an axiom of his cautious optimism that Smil tends to assume manageable instabilities and incremental changes. It is quite clear that he has not factored the mother of all oil shocks into his carefully constructed models.
A comfortable member of the American middle-class, justly proud of his professional achievements, some of Deffeyes more off-hand comments would probably enrage an active environmentalist. For one thing, he thinks our fears of nuclear power are overblown, and seriously discusses expanding our nuclear power generation capacities in a late chapter on "alternative" energy sources. Though clean, renewable solar and wind power have distinct long-term potential, the author explains that their "low energy density" means that we need large energy collectors. The capital and energy costs of installing this kind of equipment will be very high. He is dubious about the chances of deriving really significant amounts of energy from these eco-friendly sources anytime soon.
Though Deffeyes expects a major economic shake-up when oil production begins its long decline, he sees this as a difficult adjustment, not the start of civilization's collapse. It took nature hundreds of millions of years to build up its stores of fossil fuels, and we have managed to burn much of them up in a couple of hundred years. Since the author himself played no small role in their extraction and use, perhaps it is fitting that he should write their epitaph: "the fossil fuels are a one-time gift that lifted us up from subsistence agriculture and eventually should lead us to a future based on renewable resources."
David Colterjohn (Books in Canada) -- Books in Canada

"If [Deffeyes] is right we have, two or three years in which to ... accelerate our move from oil as fuel." -- Stuart Young, Nature

"The book is a gem...it's better to know what lies ahead than to be surprised too late to respond." -- Brian J. Skinner, American Scientist

Were the energy concerns of the past year a preview of everyone's future? Will gas lines in the coming years make those of 1973 look short? Is the present chaos in oil prices the leading edge of a more serious crisis that will rock national economies around the world? According to Kenneth Deffeyes, a geologist with extensive personal experience in the oil industry, the answer to all of these questions is yes. World oil production is peaking and will start to fall for good sometime during this decade.

In 1956, geophysicist M. King Hubbert--then working at the Shell research lab in Houston--predicted that U.S. oil production would reach its highest level in the early 1970s. Though roundly criticized by oil experts and economists, Hubbert's prediction came true in 1971. The hundred-year period during which most of the world's oil was discovered became known as Hubbert's peak--a span of time almost comically shorter than the hundreds of millions of years the oil deposits took to form.

Using the same methods that Hubbert used to make his stunningly accurate prediction, Deffeyes finds that a peak in world oil production is less than five years away. And he argues that new exploration and production technologies can't save us. While long-term solutions exist in the form of conservation and alternative energy sources, they probably cannot--and almost certainly will not--be enacted in time to evade short-term catastrophe.

Perhaps most surprising is that none of this is news to most specialists and many associated with the petroleum industry. But politicians, the media, and the public at large aren't hearing about it. Deffeyes wants to make sure they do. Thoroughly accessible and filled with entertaining anecdotes, his book demonstrates to the general reader why a global energy crisis is just around the corner. And, though the near-term scenario is ugly, he tells us what we can do as countries and individuals to thrive after Hubbert's peak has passed.