Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak [Paperback]

Kenneth S. Deffeyes (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 13, 2006

"This book explains both why the decline of our most precious fuel is inevitable and how challenging it will be to cope with what comes next."--Richard E. Smalley, University Professor, Rice University, and 1996 Nobel laureate


With world oil production about to peak and inexorably head toward steep decline, what fuels are available to meet rising global energy demands? That question, once thought to address a fairly remote contingency, has become ever more urgent, as a spate of books has drawn increased public attention to the imminent exhaustion of the economically vital world oil reserves. Kenneth S. Deffeyes, a geologist who was among the first to warn of the coming oil crisis, now takes the next logical step and turns his attention to the earth's supply of potential replacement fuels. In Beyond Oil, he traces out their likely production futures, with special reference to that of oil, utilizing the same analytic tools developed by his former colleague, the pioneering petroleum-supply authority M. King Hubbert.

"The bad news in this book is made bearable by the author's witty, conversational writing style. If my college econ textbooks had been written this way, I might have learned economics." --Rupert Cutler, The Roanoke Times

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For those who wonder why certain countries insist on developing nuclear power, geologist Deffeyes has a possible answer: "World oil production has ceased growing." In this sobering, instructive and somewhat apocalyptic book, Deffeyes (Hubbert's Peak) paints a bleak picture of the future of fossil fuels and of what will happen to the world without them. Deffeyes bases his book on the work of M. King Hubbert, who mathematically determined that the world's oil supply would peak in 2000 and then drop steadily thereafter. Deffeyes tackles the mathematics of Hubbert's method and offers his own prediction (that the peak will occur at the end of 2005), but there is plenty here for those who aren't enamored with numbers, including a crash course in the slow evolution of oil. Oil and its related petroleum byproducts, Deffeyes points out, have changed the world economically, technologically and socially, and its absence could have a similarly massive, though negative, effect. Deffeyes predicts that famine, war and death will result from the shortages, but he does more than just sound the alarm: a large portion of the book is devoted to surveying the pros and cons of alternative resources like coal and hydrogen. Though Deffeyes offers only a few practical suggestions for the reader, most of which are obvious (i.e., get on a waitlist for a hybrid car), this is an earnestly written cautionary tale and a great resource for anyone looking to become energy literate. B&W illustrations and diagrams.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Deffeyes' survey of oil production shares the central thesis of Out of Gas, by David Goodstein (2004). Both cite Hubbert's Peak, a prediction of when petroleum output will reach an apex and decline irreversibly. That'll happen on November 24, 2005, Deffeyes lightheartedly announces, and after detailing the mathematical formula by which Hubbert's Peak is calculated, he examines options for postponing the inevitable. That is, how could geologists and engineers get more oil out of the ground? Could they discover more? Extract it more efficiently? Mine oil shale? Increase coal or natural-gas production? For each of these topics, Deffeyes delves into the geophysical characteristics of the fuel's source rocks and how those affect the economics of retrieving it; he then returns the discussion to its beginning: that the world is near or on Hubbert's Peak. Deffeyes' background as an oil-company geologist and university professor lends a realistic pragmatism to his presentation, which is replete with personal anecdotes and funny remarks that enliven his text. A practical yet genial treatment. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Hill and Wang; 1st edition (June 13, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080902957X
• ISBN-13: 978-0809029570
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 6.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (49 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #663,894 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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196 of 197 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A geologist's study of Peak Oil and likely consequences March 27, 2005

By Richard H. Burkhart

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This succinct book is an engaging view of Peak Oil by a gruff, no-nonsense petroleum geologist. It is not just a concise overview of the origins of oil and the significance of the Peak. Think of the Peak as that era when the price of oil soars because supply can no longer meet demand, no matter how hard the effort to increase production. For the mathematically literate, Deffeyes gives the best popular explanation yet of the Hubbert method of calculating Peak Oil. Deffeyes curve-fit puts the peak at 2006 - hence his sense of urgency.

Yet the major emphasis of the book is on the energy alternatives. Coming from an academic geologist deeply rooted in the culture of the energy industries, the chapters on natural gas, coal, nuclear, tar sands, and oil shale are most welcome. Most of the books on Peak Oil are not by geologists, so their assessments on these subjects are second hand. Deffeyes 2001 book, Hubbert's Peak - The Impending World Oil Shortage, focused mostly on conventional oil.

There are two extremes to the views on Peak Oil. Some people, often termed "cornucopians", say not to worry - technology will come to the rescue, energy alternatives will take over as soon as the price is right. Others, the "prophets of doom", predict the collapse of industrial civilization and human population via environmental degradation, warfare, disease, and famine. Or at best they predict a return to a primitive 19th century style of existence with far fewer people on the planet. Deffeyes predicts tough going, but he also outlines a way for us to scrape through a few more decades until more sustainable technology can be developed and scaled up. The kind of civilization that can be sustained over the long haul is still an open question.

His short term fixes (p.... 183) include small diesel cars that get 90 miles per gallon, coal fired electrical power plants, wind turbines, and nuclear power plants. It also looks like the old Fisher-Tropsch process for coal gasification will be revived to produce aviation and diesel fuel. On the one hand environmentalists alarmed by global warming can hardly wait for Peak Oil in order to cut back on green house gases. On the other hand, the use coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, is even more alarming. Deffeyes advocates pumping the carbon dioxide waste underground, but currently it mostly goes up the smokestack. However unpalatable some of these fixes may be to many citizens, I must confess that they seem quite likely, based on current politics and economics.

A few errata and quibbles: On p. 16 the permeability increases 100 times, not 1 million times, when the grain size increase by 10, according to the quadratic law he cites. For the P and 1/P equations in the graph on p. 41, delete the + sign. On the bottom of p. 40 he claims that the actual peak must happen at or before the peak of the model curve (a logistic), which is a very close fit to the historical data from 1958 to the present. However this is just a model - due to economics or politics the actual peak could happen either before or after the model peak.

In fact, since the market for oil is global, prices will be far more important for the world peak oil than for country-level peak oil. Suppose there were an oil shock right now. Then financial hardship would force a sharp drop in oil usage over the next few years while there would be an all-out effort to quickly drill even the most costly and marginal oil fields. This would, of course, cause a peak right now, but it could soon lead to an excess of supply over demand, a drop in oil prices, then a renewal of latent demand that could drive production to a higher peak in the future. That is, the period of peak oil would be stretched out to become more like a jagged plateau. However by extracting more of the remaining oil sooner rather than later, the subsequent drop off would be even more severe.

Even without an oil shock, over a short time frame, current data trumps modeling. It normally takes many years from oil discovery to production, so it is already known what is in the pipeline. One recent UK study identified many major oil fields coming online through 2007 but few thereafter. A study of peak oil for major oil companies predicted 2008 on the average. This may explain why Colin Campbell's peak oil date is 2008. Nevertheless the logistic curve has a logical derivation in this context and it is the solution of a simple and widely applied nonlinear differential equation, so it is quite convincing as a rough model. I expect Hubbert's Peak to become a standard example in future texts on mathematical modeling. The cornucopians faith in technological and free market magic is soon to be sorely tested. Read more ›

85 of 86 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally Some Decent Info About Oil Shale And Tar Sands March 16, 2005

By Doctor Quartz

Format:Hardcover

In this follow up to his previous book on Hubbert's Peak/Peak Oil, Deffeyes gives us some engrossing info on such subjects as the Alberta tar sands, the Green River oil shale and nuclear power. Out of all the peak oil books I've read so far, this one is the only one that gives a very concise and knowledgable summary on these and other "alternatives" to cheap oil. Most other peak oil writers aren't old school geologists with hydrocarbon strings pumping in their veins instead of blood, so you don't get the feeling they really know what they are talking about. Several books I've read casually dismiss the Alberta tar sands and the Green River oil shale and shouldn't. Deffeyes doesn't. I'm actually a bit more hopeful and optimistic about the world's energy future after reading this book. (Not by much, though.)

59 of 62 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Deffeyes's Reprise July 9, 2005

By David Delaney

Format:Hardcover

I have just finished reading Kenneth Deffeyes's new book "Beyond oil: The view from Hubbert's Peak" (2005) .

I almost didn't buy this book. I assumed it would not add much to what I had learned from Deffeyes's earlier book on the same subject, "Hubbert's Peak: The impending world oil shortage". What a mistake that would have been!

"Hubbert's Peak" remains an extremely valuable book for those who want to understand *why* Hubbert's hypothesis may be correct, but "Beyond Oil" is much better at explaining the hypothesis and showing us that the data supports it overwhelmingly. The great new value in "Beyond Oil" is to be found in Chapter 3, The Hubbert Method.

In "Hubbert's Peak", Deffeyes presented only qualitative and graphical descriptions of Hubbert's theory in the main text. He describes what the theory means and why it was important. Reader's may believe him because the rest of the book makes his credentials unmistakable: Professor Emeritus of Geology at Princeton, obvious encyclopedic knowledge of petroleum geology, 50 years in the oil business or consulting to it, friendship and collegial association with Hubbert himself. But his editor did not let him put any equations in the main text. When he does get to the equations in the notes at the back, their presentation is too concise, they require too much math knowledge for most readers, and lack the associated explanation that would make their relationship to the theory easy to understand, even for many readers who have the necessary math knowledge. It's all there, but you have to be committed and sophisticated to dig it out....

In this new presentation, Deffeyes has performed a brilliant act of creation in constructing a quantitative explanation of Hubbert's theory that can be completely understood by anyone who can read graphs and do elementary high school algebra. (The success of Hubbert's Peak must have persuaded his editors to let him put a few equations in the text of this book.) Instead of understanding merely the results of Hubbert's theory, and accepting them on Deffeyes's authority, you can understand, completely, the sequence of thought that leads from data to theory and back to data to check the support for the theory. The effect is compelling. Hubbert did not seem to understand his own theory this clearly until a decade of so after his early publications in the 1950s, and he never explained it simply. His early arguments depended on educated guesses about the total volume of oil that could eventually be recovered from the oil provinces in question. To this day, his detractors criticize the theory incorrectly on the assumption that it depends on a separate and independent estimate of the size of the ultimately recoverable resource in order to predict the date of the peak of production. Hubbert removed this dependence, but his papers are apparently so hard to read that those who are looking for a way to refute the theory miss the improvement. The revised theory *generates* a robust estimate of the ultimately recoverable resource from historical production data. As history approaches the predicted peak, as now, the prediction of the peak becomes utterly compelling.

Deffeyes's renders Hubbert's theory transparently clear. It's essence is a guess, verified by appropriate analysis of historical production data, that the rate of oil production has depended and will depend mainly and linearly on the fraction of the ultimately recoverable resource that remains to be produced. The maximum possible production rate at any level of cumulative production is proportional to the product of the remaining fraction and the cumulative production. This dependence on the fraction of oil remaining is manifested by an ingeniously selected plot of the historical production rate data and the historical cumulative production data.

The theory's disregard of other factors on which production must depend, such as the price of oil, technological improvements in extraction, accidents of history, and geopolitical incentives and constraints, infuriates the detractors of the theory. The answer is that the production rate does indeed depend on these other factors, but the data demonstrates compellingly that it depends on them much less than it depends on the fraction of the ultimate total that remains to be extracted. The reasons for this dominance of the single factor is well understood by geologists. "Hubbert's Peak" explains this dominance much better than "Beyond Oil", so you'll need both books to argue against committed detractors. But anyone who takes the trouble to first understand Hubbert's hypothesis and what the data says about it will be looking to these explanations mainly to find reasons for the obvious empirical truth of the hypothesis.

Economists (and those who have been stupefied by economists' assertions) do not accept the hypothesis that the maximum production rate depends mainly on the remaining fraction, even though historical data provides overwhelmingly powerful support for the hypothesis and geological reasoning explains this support. I am convinced that the economists have the mistaken impression that Hubbert's theory is merely qualitative and descriptive and as such cannot defeat their own simplistic qualitative ideas about resource quality pyramids and supply and demand. Everyone who gives evidence of actually understanding Hubbert's theory seems to accept it. Those who repudiate it seem always to give evidence of not understanding it, or even of not caring to understand it.

Much loud opinion misrepresents Hubbert's theory, or gives it a status roughly equivalent to that of, say, the opinions of Wall Street analysts. It seems likely that Deffeyes's saw that his "Hubbert's Peak" had not produced the popular understanding he had hoped for, that Hubbert is sound science. Thank goodness he has taken this second shot in "Beyond Oil".

David Delaney, Ottawa Read more ›

53 of 56 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Dr Ian Lavering (Southern Hemisphere) May 16, 2005

By Dr. Ian H. Lavering

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Beyond Oil, The View from Hubbert's Peak, by Kenneth Deffeyes. Hill and Wang. 2005, 202 p, ISBN 13:978-0-8090-2956-3. Available from Amazon.com.

The follow-up volume to Kenneth Deffeyes very successful Hubbert's Peak, the impending world oil shortage (2001), this book (written in 2004) seeks to take up the discussion where his previous volume left off; namely, what alternatives are available if the world is about to experience the ongoing decline in the productivity and quality of major crude oil reserves. While this intriguing issue is a critical one for the current state of world affairs, and the future of the world economy, the early part of the book goes over some of the ground already discussed by the earlier book. One would have hoped that this was not necessary and that the space would otherwise be devoted to covering the new ground with greater depth of argument on new issues.

What is new in this volume is that Deffeyes examines the alternative energy sources and the issues associated with their use. His key point is that even if Hubbert is wrong, to do nothing, is the worst of possible alternatives. He sees great urgency in the next few years which previous generations have never had to face. Alternative energy strategies are required immediately or a major decline will put much of our fate in the hands of others. Indeed he suggests that the world of tomorrow will be a very unfamiliar place to those of us who have grown up with a relatively abundant oil supply. But to face this situation we are likely to have nothing more than the technologies we have already developed, not an attractive prospect.

Deffeyes oil peak is postulated as 24 November 2005 (`Thanksgiving' Day), after this date world oil will go into decline, slowly at first then more rapidly.... Some of the impacts of this potential decline are already evident in market trends evident in 2004 and 2005. Record oil prices and periodic oscillations close to these peak prices are seen as the key indicators of oil imminent decline. While the reasons for such nominally high oil prices are multifaceted, their impact is likely to be repeated, if Deffeyes is even only half right. He sees recent record oil output (2003) being only 3% higher than 1998 - a trend of decreasing incremental growth is in Deffeyes views a sure sign that the peak is very close. A decline to 90% of peak capacity is suggested by 2019. The key vulnerability for the world is transport and trade; the movement of goods and the marketing of services will be the key sector where the major impact will fall.

In my view, the weakest aspect of his previous book was Deffeyes lack of insight into the potential of natural gas to be used as a substitute for oil based fuels (diesel and gasoline) in transport. This issue still remains a matter concern in my mind which I don't think this second book alleviates. Deffeyes deals with the issue in his second book in chapter four `Mostly Gas'. In this, chapter Deffeyes suggests that in North America natural gas markets are experiencing peak production, if not decline, similar to that of global oil production. What concerns me most about this argument is that gas markets in the rest of the world are not as well connected, integrated or mature as the North American gas market. In fact there is considerable spare gas capacity and undeveloped resources in the rest of the world. Unlike the global oil market, gas markets are still patchy and poorly connected with a deal of infrastructure lacking and hence greater potential for additional supply. Not all parts of the potential global gas market are developed or have the level of infrastructure necessary to reach peak capacity, and may not do so for much of the next 20 to 30 years. I thus differ greatly with Deffeyes with his argument that natural gas is likely to experience capacity limitations at the same time as the oil peak or that the gas capacity will be similar to that well evident for crude oil capacity. As a consequence, I see considerable potential for natural gas substitution for crude oil fuels in transport and this is where I would differ with Deffeyes. As a consequence I suggest we may not quite be in the bind which he suggests.

Deffeyes' consideration of alternative energy sources looks at both existing and alternative energy sources. The option of coal (abundant but a poor environmental record) has the advantage of established technology but as yet cannot be regarded as a viable alternative for petroleum. I do, however, agree with the thrust of Deffeyes views on tar, oil shale and other forms of low-grade petroleum; their extraction costs and productive capacity do not provide much comfort or potential to relieve the possible shortfall in crude oil production.

Deffeyes does see some potential in the capacity of the nuclear energy industry for electricity generation. He suggests that wider use of nuclear-based electricity generation is an important option to the growing shortage of oil and natural gas. Deffeyes sees hydrogen fuel as a partial solution for the transport sector; natural gas is the preferred source for generating hydrogen, coal is the second favored source. But whatever the source he doesn't see the Hydrogen Economy of Jeremy Rifkin developing.

Whatever the options chosen, doing nothing is not an option. Major changes in all of the agricultural and industrial processes we have become used to are what Deffeyes sees as being most susceptible to change. In his view, there is not enough time to research alternatives, we have to start making major changes which generate immediate benefits; there isn't scope for an exhaustive search. Energy efficient automobiles, cogeneration and enhanced carbon dioxide oil recovery are just some of the necessary options.

While I am quite sympathetic to some of Deffeyes views and some of his possible solutions, I see a lot more potential in natural gas than he does and it remains the most readily available and least radical change with which we can and will have to cope with the consequences of the coming oil peak and subsequent decline. My view of the coming oil peak is that it is just another fuel-technology transition which the human race will face; like the many which have preceded it and the others which are likely to follow.

Like the skeptical environmentalist, I agree that the human race didn't leave the Stone Age because it ran out of stones. It also didn't leave the steam age because it ran out of coal; thus the human race will not be leaving the oil age because it runs out of oil. In each of these cases, the human race found new combinations of technology and resources which were more useful and efficient than their predecessors. Technology and resources are never static and they have and will always change and oscillate through human history. We will just have to used to the fact that our day will pass before some of the changes we anticipate come about.

I recommend both Deffyes' books as useful and interesting works, both with some limitations, which hopefully we can all forgive him for, while also being thankful and appreciative of his efforts and the lifetime of experience which they embody.

Dr Ian Lavering
Adjunct Professor
MBT Program UNSW Read more ›