The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Mark P. Mills (Author) "WHAT MOST FRUSTRATES those who feel passionate about energy is that most Americans don't..." (more)
Key Phrases: carbon books, purer power, more energy consumption, United States, James Watt, Annual Energy Review (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Contrary to "Lethargist" Chicken Littles who champion gas taxes and mileage standards, this free–market–oriented, techno-optimist manifesto insists that "[h]umanity is destined to find and consume more energy, and still more, forever." Huber, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute (Hard Green; Galileo's Revenge; etc.), and venture capitalist and former Reagan administration staffer Mills contend that, in conjunction with our ever-increasing scientific know-how, consuming energy yields good things, including the ability to find and harness more energy. The authors develop intriguing contrarian challenges to the conventional wisdom (improved energy efficiency, they argue cogently, boosts energy demand instead of curbing it) and their discussions of new technologies—electric drive trains, awesome lasers, "dexterous robots"—that may profoundly reshape energy usage is illuminating. But their treatment of energy-consumption pitfalls like global warming is cursory and unconvincing, and they devote too little space to explaining exactly where new energy supplies will come from, and too much to assurances that "[f]uels recede, demand grows... but logic ascends, and with the rise of logic we attain the impossible—infinite energy, perpetual motion and the triumph of power." Long on Nietzschean bombast but short on some crucial specifics, theirs is an intriguing but incomplete vision of energy policy and prospects.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The authors point out that America consumes 25 percent of the world's natural gas, 23 percent of its hard coal, 25 percent of its crude petroleum, 43 percent of its motor gasoline, and 26 percent of its electricity. They reveal that our main use of energy isn't lighting, locomotion, or cooling; what we use energy for, mainly, is to extract, refine, process, and purify energy itself. Huber and Mills list what they call the seven energy heresies: the cost of energy as we use it has less and less to do with the cost of fuel; "waste" is virtuous; the more efficient our technology, the more energy we consume; the competitive advantage in manufacturing is now swinging decisively back toward the U.S.; human demand for energy is insatiable; the raw fuels are not running out; and America's relentless pursuit of high-grade energy does not add chaos to the global environment but rather restores its order. Readers with prior knowledge of this complicated subject will appreciate their conclusions the most. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (January 18, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465031161
• ISBN-13: 978-0465031160
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (67 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #450,914 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

232 of 297 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A sound technological perspective, February 23, 2005

By	James Daniel (Austin, TX United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is very close to being a science book, but the topic keeps it from being strictly a science book. The topic is necessarily conjecture about how we will meet future energy needs. The authors, however, are honest about what is conjecture on their part and what is science, and point to the recent development of inexpensive LED lighting as an example of how long-term plans to save energy (by investing in flourescent lighting) end up being foiled by new technological developments. Their primary suggestion, with regard to energy policy over the next few years, is to see what new technology develops and adapt to it, rather than take our current technological knowledge and assume that it will apply 30 years from now. This is in stark contrast to similar books that attempt to use current scientific and technological knowledge to predict doom for the world with remarkable confidence.

The most engaging and scientific part of the book is the discussion of efficiency and energy and entropy. Most of the author's optimistic conclusions arise from their observations made here. Efficiency often ends up being misused, by their reasoning, to make two incorrect conclusions about energy policy. One such incorrect conclusion is that the US economy makes very, very inefficient use of its energy. To the contrary, such a conclusion assumes that somehow energy in coal form is equivalent to energy in electrical form is equivalent to energy running a laptop PC. The authors argue, convincingly, that energy in coal form is mostly useless, and part of it gets spent reversing entropy enough to generate electricity, and again in the PC, part of it is spent keeping the processor cool enough to actually work. The energy spent in the purification process is not "waste," hence their subtitle "the virtue of waste." That is not to say that figuring out how to spend less energy in the conversion process is undesirable, but it will always be there, and it will always be a fairly high percentage. (The most efficient process ever devised was a rocket engine, about 60% efficient.)

The second aspect of efficiency that the authors point out is that designing more efficient processes does not, overall, save energy. When processes become cheap and easy, they get used more, and demanded more, hence the PC explosion since 1980. Similarly, cars were made more efficient, and thus it became cheaper and easier to drive more often, so we all did. Energy use exploded with more efficiency, not less.

Where the authors enter the policy and philosophical realm, these ideas about efficiency and entropy and "ordered energy" are used to generate a general picture about how humanity has progressed from earlier times, giving reason for optimism into the future. The thesis is fairly simple: using energy enables us to gain more energy, and we don't run out of fuel because what we are really looking for isn't more fuel but more useful energy. Before electrical power became standard, the demise of our forests was the dire prediction, but they've been growing back since electricity became ubiquitous. In 1910, we spent 27% of farmland just to "fuel" our horses for transportation; now, our entire transportation grid, including roads, oil wells, refineries, and so on uses less land than that, while moving orders of magnitude more people and goods. Their philosophical analysis: we use far more dense, ordered energy, which enables us to preserve the environment more efficiently as well as do what we want more efficiently. There is no -objective- reason to predict that this trend would end in some fuel crisis, and every fuel crisis of doom prediction has proven false. Technology has always provided a new way of gaining energy efficiently. We can't predict how it will handle the next step, but there is no reason to believe that it won't do so beyond one's own natural pessimism.

The strength of this book is that it doesn't read like Michael Moore or Ann Coulter, but deals with issues from solid science and pragmatic principles. It definitely leans toward the right side of the political spectrum, mostly in a libertarian way. It takes environmental concerns seriously, though not as seriously as environmental activists would like. The issue of global warming is addressed tangentially; addressing it directly would be its own book. They do not dismiss the idea of anthropogenic CO2 causing global warming out of hand, but rather point out technological ways of eliminating CO2 from emissions while still using coal and oil as primary sources of fuel. They also point out that the amount of land needed to supply our energy needs with current wind/solar technologies would be prohibitive; a power plant plus coal mine takes up very much less space than fields of windmills or huge arrays of solar panels, greatly increasing humanity's "footprint" on the earth. The current technical state of fuel cells is discussed fairly thoroughly, along with reasonable speculation about the future of automobile technologies. Further, they point out that if less CO2 emissions is a primary goal, then we should seriously consider further development of safe nuclear power. They don't advocate it, per se, but rather point out that it is a technological option.

These technical discussions alone are worth the price of the book. I love it that they quote Richard Feynman and Sadi Carnot; more pretentious authors would quote Einstein or Newton in an attempt to sound respectable. Feynman had a remarkably keen and common-sense approach to science and physics, which the authors use to their advantage.

The authors write no particular prescription for our energy issues, except to point out that no predicted crisis has ever come to pass, and that we probably shouldn't write regulations based on current technology in an attempt to speed the development of future technology. Fuel cells are all well and good, but basing our current policy on them before the technology has become economical isn't practical, and might get in the way of other, more useful technologies that we don't even know about, yet.

Overall, I find this an honest expression of the optimistic side of the energy debate, and is therefore a good source of material for those interested, whether they agree or disagree with the conclusions.

40 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Grand Tale, August 7, 2006

By	Dean Smith (Gaston, Or) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy (Paperback)

Huber and Mills tell a happy and triumphant story in The Bottomless Well. Our energy future is secure. "Energy technology is now poised to evolve faster than at any time before in human history." Don't worry about the details, the markets will work it all out (markets never fail). The story is cast as a battle between order and chaos, life and death. It is a "chronicle of humanity's struggle against the second law of thermodynamics, not in theory but in the real world . . . It is a story of ingenious valves and gates that flip open and closed, with just the right timing, to push energy up the thermodynamic hill, to structure our environment, and to add order to our lives." xxix. Capitalists are on the side of order. Ghandi and government regulators are on the side of chaos.

In order to follow the story, the reader must grasp a number of basics.
1) "Raw energy is nothing; context and order are everything." 54.
2) "Order is life and chaos is death." 153.
3) "The more energy we capture and put to use, the more readily we will capture still more." 5.
4) "We use well-ordered energy to distance ourselves from chaos." 53.
5) "It is by throwing [low-grade] energy overboard that we maintain and increase the [high-grade power and therefore the] order of our existence." 44.
6) "Massive amounts of low-grade energy are consumed to deliver relatively tiny amounts of high-grade power." 49.
7) "Efficiency increases consumption." 123.
8) "Heat - chaos - is where ordered power ends up when the order dissipates . . . If it isn't effectively dissipated, heat takes microprocessors, sensors, and engines to the grave with it. Heat is the insidious enemy of valves, seals, capacitors, and logic." 146.

So, according to our authors, low-grade energy is converted to high-grade power, high-grade power creates order and order defeats chaos. Why believe the authors? How do we know that order prevails? The authors invite the reader to be awed by what technologically super-charged power can do. For example: "pump up millimeter-wave power high enough and it can cook things, or people, or hostile microorganisms, at quite a distance." 148. "It takes far fewer people to fight and direct wars today than it did even less than a decade ago, because the speed and power of the front-line soldier had been so greatly amplified; our distant wars are now fought, once again, by a few, a happy few, a band of brothers, while the rest of us lie a-bed, watching their progress on Fox." 149.

If there is anyone other than the authors (perhaps a Fox viewer or two) who believe there are a "happy few, a band of brothers" creating order and defeating chaos in Iraq, thanks to our awesome ability to "cook people from a distance," then perhaps the authors have made their case. Those who see the facts otherwise, however, may wonder what planet the authors are talking about. It seems the authors mistook their happy dream of order for reality. Though the Iraq reality check did not register with them, you would have thought any number of environmental reality checks would have registered. Not so. "The logic [they say] of fuel-retrieving machines has advanced much faster than the fuels have retreated - we keep getting closer to the receding horizon. Environmental concerns are a separate matter, important in their own right. But the issue of exhaustion is resolved. Energy supplies are - for all practical purposes - infinite." 181. In other words, don't worry about the chaos, the dumping of heat - "the insidious enemy of valves, seals, capacitors, and logic" -- into the distant reaches of the planet. The oceans and sky are big enough to take it. Dump away. Indeed, "we [the happy few] use well-ordered energy to distance ourselves from [environmental] chaos [and evil doers]."

One could conclude that the authors are a couple of happy, delusional guys (neo-cons maybe). The truth is, however, that Huber, at least, is probably more angry than happy. He despises environmentalists, who, he believes, have cooked up more trouble and hoaxes than the devil himself. Environmental concerns exist largely in the minds of weak-headed liberals. (See Huber's book Hard Green).

In spite of its faults, this book is well worth the read. The authors have an interesting perspective. They write well. At their best, they tell a grand tale and present a sometimes reasoned challenge to the gloomy Malthusians. Many of the basics listed above are defensible, and all of them are worth thinking about. At their worst, the authors treat you to science fiction.

90 of 121 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Obfuscating and gee-whizzing the obvious, August 5, 2005

By	Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

In this breezy and somewhat obtuse tome of energy babble Huber and Mills enthuse about an endless supply of energy with a kind of breathless giddiness that would shame even the late economist Julian Simon, author of the notion of perpetual economic growth. Essentially what Huber and Mills are telling us is this: we will not run out of energy until the atoms of the universe dissipate into the final stage of entropy some trillions of years from now.

More immediately, as the oil patch runs dry we will convert the hybrid-electric engine (now coming hugely onto market) to the electric engine, which will get its power from electricity generated from coal and nuclear plants, and when we run out of coal and uranium, fusion will be practical and then something else--after all, matter is energy and vice-versa, and with a sufficiently advanced technology, we should be able to extract the energy even in a lump of rock.

They are right, we are not about to run out of energy. I give them a "duh" on that. The sun still has five billion years to go. Furthermore, energy is really just an exploitable contrivance between the relatively hot and the relatively cold. What is important, as the authors never tire of mentioning, is the "ordering" of energy. That is, how energy can be concentrated and aimed at some kind of useful enterprise, such as a laser beam or a logic gate in a computer and not dissipated into the atmosphere as heat. (Although they insist that this dissipation, this "waste," is not only okay, but to be celebrated as evidence of our technological prowess. What they should be saying is that the less we dissipate, the less we pollute, the more technologically adept we are.)

Here's another of their pronouncements: "As we have seen, most of the energy we consume is used to process and purify energy itself." This quote is from page 138, but you'll find essentially the same expression several other places in the book. In fact, there is a lot of deliberate repetition as though the authors are giving a didactic seminar to some corporation's employees (or massaging the CEO)--which is what I suspect they sometimes do. This may account for the fact that they often sound like they want to stand up and shout: "American workers you are the most productive in the world--rejoice! Now get back to work."

Yes, most of the energy we consume is used to process and purify energy itself. Ergo, the more energy we use the more energy we use. Or if that isn't clear, try this: energy use increases because energy use increases.

This tautology is not without (again) its didactic merit. The first large-scale use of the coal-powered steam engine was to pump water out of coal mines. In other words, energy was used to gain more energy.

In the same vein (sorry), on page 136 the authors have a graph showing that the United States, the wealthiest nation on earth, has the highest per capita energy consumption while lesser nations are less wealthy and use less energy. The authors conclude, "The more energy a nation uses, the richer it gets."

A tautology employed to catch our eye is one thing, but confounding cause with effect is quite another. Measuring energy use is already measuring wealth. Wealth and energy use are positively correlated because they are inseparable. People are poor in Bangladesh not because they don't use enough energy. They don't use enough energy because they can't afford to.

The real reason per capita energy use has increased in this country is because we have gotten wealthier. And the reason we have gotten wealthier is mostly related to globalization and free trade, to increased productivity because of technological advances, to education and science, to the greater employment of women in the workplace, and to the use of cheap labor, both from poorly paid illegal immigrants and relatively cheap outsourced labor. This is not to mention the exploitation of the natural resources of other countries and indirectly their cheap labor.

Another "point" Huber and Mills make is that a greater use of energy in, for example, gas-guzzling SUVs is not necessarily wasteful since more powerful engines using more fuel gain for their users time. Yes, if you go 90 miles per hour you will get where you're going sooner than if you chug along at 65--that is, unless you're on the freeway at rush hour.

There are a few slurs in the book aimed at people the authors don't think are too bright, such as greens and environmentalists. One of those slurs with the most ironic quality is the one aimed at George Orwell. After attempting to dismiss Orwell's dystopian vision in "1984," the authors write that all kinds of non-dystopian things were happening "While Orwell was typing..." (p. 135) The implication one gets is that Huber and Mills are writing, composing and edifying while George Orwell was only "typing." The irony is not so much that these two gentlemen are not in the same league as Orwell as writers and thinkers, but that Orwell's vision is upon us this very day with poverty, pollution and perpetual war, whether Huber and Mills notice it or not.

One more point about which the authors are dead on right. We won't run out of oil because as oil becomes scarce its price will no longer be competitive with other energy sources and so there will always be some crude left in the ground. QED: we won't run out of oil.

If you want to know about peak oil, read Beyond Oil (2005) by Kenneth S. Deffeyes. If you want a contretemps to the views of Huber and Mills, I recommend Brian Czech's Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train (2000). And if you're interested in the prospect for a hydrogen economy, The Hype about Hydrogen (2004) by Joseph J. Romm is excellent.