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Kenneth S. Deffeyes

Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak Paperback – Illustrated, June 13, 2006

by Kenneth S. Deffeyes (Author)

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"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

Print length

224 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Hill and Wang
Publication date

June 13, 2006
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.51 x 8.5 inches
ISBN-10

9780809029570
ISBN-13

978-0809029570
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"We are all hooked on oil, and oil is getting scarcer. Like it or not, changes are coming. But do we understand our choices, or even the variables that control our choices? Using aggressive analysis, common sense, and a liberal dash of humor, Deffeyes lays out our options. It's your life, your choices, your future; you can't afford to miss this book" --Brian J. Skinner, Eugene Higgins Professor of Geology and Geophysics, Yale University
"With his folksy style and penetrating vision, Deffeyes tells it like it is. This book is another nail in the coffin of the age of oil." --David Goodstein, Vice Provost, California Institute of Technology, and author of "Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil
"Worldwide oil production is now in the process of peaking and will soon begin an irreversible decline. With compelling, down-to-earth reasoning, 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 Nobel laureate in chemistry, 1996
"A valuable encore to "Hubbert's Peak, this new book by Professor Deffeyes offers a wide-ranging overview of the world's energy alternatives 'beyond oil.' Its crystal-clear prose, easily understood by the layman, is peppered with anecdotes, memories, and scientific insights, mirroring the author's half century of first-hand experience in the industry." --A.M. Samsam Bakhtiari, senior expert, National Iranian Oil Company
"In his new book, Professor Deffeyes stands on the world's peak oil output, like Moses peering from the mountaintop to the Promised Land. "Beyond Oil is a must read for anyone who wantsto learn more about one of the biggest challenges humanity has ever faced." --Matthew R. Simmons, chairman, Simmons & Company International

About the Author

Kenneth S. Deffeyes, a former researcher for Shell Oil Company and author of When Oil Peaked and Beyond Oil, is emeritus professor of geology at Princeton University.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 080902957X
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hill and Wang; 1st edition (June 13, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780809029570
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0809029570
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.3 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.51 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,656,792 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #426 in Natural Resource Extraction Industry (Books)
- #3,169 in Geology (Books)
- #3,950 in Energy Production & Extraction

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63 ratings

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Gilberto Villahermosa

Beyond Petroleum!

Reviewed in the United States on March 17, 2007

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Welcome to the post-Hubbert peak, the world beyond oil!

"Business as usual is not in the cards," writes author Kenneth Deffeyes, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and a recognized expert on energy. "Whether we like it or not, there will be major rearrangements in the world economy. It would be more orderly if we were to generate a blueprint for a society constrained by the availability of resources. Then we need a noncatastrophic pathway that takes us from here to that blueprint."

Unlike his previous book ("Hubbert's Peak. The Impending World Oil Shortage") "Beyond Oil" is my more readable and accessable to the layman. Deffeyes reviews the origins of oil and Hubbert's calculations, but then goes on to discuss gas, coal, tar sands and heavy oil, uranium, and hydrogen. He then sums up the world's energy situation in a chapter he calls "The Big Picture".

Deffeyes argues that the world has already reached its peak oil production and that henceforth oil production can only decline.

There are, however, shortcomings to Deffeyes methodology. He greatly underestimates, in my opinion, the impact of ethynol. Currently, ethynol comprises 2.5 percent of America's energy (about 5 billion barrels a year) and this is due to double within the next two years. Yes, it is not as efficient as oil to produce - it takes more energy to produce ethynol than the ethynol itself produces - but America has land and corn (and other crops) to produce ethynol in relative abundance.

The author also fails to discuss in any depth the development of synthetic fuels, which the U.S. government has been pursuing very aggressively and, if reports are to be believe, successfully.

The author also writes briefly and incorrectly about the growing world population, a topic well outside his realm of expertise. Recent trends in demographics indicate that the population of the world will actually stabilize at around 9 billion and then decline in around 2050. The problem will not be an exploding population; the problem will be a shortage of labor worldwide.

Still, this is a tremendously well written book. And to his credit Deffeyes discusses what the individual American citizen should do to make his or her life easier. (The author begins this portion of the book with the following sentence: "Lets have a private talk around the kitchen table.")

In short, this book is everything that "Hubbert's Peak" is not.

And its message is clear: We are finally running out of oil and as a result, we are headed for major dislocations in the world's economy.

2 people found this helpful

A geologist's study of Peak Oil and likely consequences

Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2005

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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.

197 people found this helpful

Very good and very disappointing

Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2007

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The book is very good, i.e. very instructing, in the part where the author has most expertise, i.e. oil field geology.
If you want to understand the theory behing the often referred-to Hubbert's peak, this is the book to read. The author, i.e. the professor, takes you through it, one step at a time, and even if you are not a science major, you think you get most of it, at least enough of it to buy the author's 3 main conclusions, i.e. that oil production has peaked on Thanksgiving day 2005 or thereabout, that the decline is inevitable from that date onward and that oil & gas production will have ceased altogether by the middle of the present century.
As to the balance of the book, the author warns the reader that his undertanding of economics and political science is rather limited; and he actually delivers on his warning. His views on the future of the non-oil energy sources, i.e. nuclear, coal, wind, etc. are quite superficial, alredy somewhat dated and not particularly enlighting.
In a nutshell, read chapters 1 to 3, or possibly 4, and skip the rest.

6 people found this helpful

Top reviews from other countries

andys

A practical view of the end of oil

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 23, 2008

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The author says early on that he isn't going to cover the politics, economics or environmental consequences of peak oil and he doesn't. This book is purely about the geological and practical side of the problem.

And it's non the worse for that. It's a refreshing change to find a book that doesn't carp on about carbon emissions or how terrible big cars are, just where oil comes from and why production has peaked. On top of that there's good coverage of why the so called oil alternatives like shale oils aren't as much of an alternative as they are touted to be.

All in all this is a cracking book on the subject. Authoritative and yet very readable.

8 people found this helpful

M. Sear

Boring but worthwhile

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 23, 2009

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Personally I found this book duller than watching paint dry. It has a lot of worthwhile information, but I'm not sure if it is all worth knowing. Bottom line for me is: Oil is running out. We are all in deep do do. The worldwide economic crisis has kind of taken away form the problems of oil running out, but it is happening. I'm just not sure how knowing more abut it has helped me. But thats maybe a fault of me an not this book!! Worth reading, just dont expect to be "excited".

One person found this helpful

DMJ MIAH

Good

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 19, 2009

Verified Purchase

This is an excellent book, for those especially in the industry and want to know about this business. If your a student or just curious it is a must read. I found a lot of clarity in issues that were of interest to me, though I must admit the author is a typical geologist a little bit of a pessimist. Nevertheless, it is worth reading and its worth knowing the thoughts of an expert.

Doalch

A history of oil

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 2, 2008

Verified Purchase

Excellent and informative read, not just on Hubbert's peak oil theory, but also on the history of oil, drilling techniques, extraction and the possible future oil alternatives such as hydrogen and biofuels.

3 people found this helpful

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