Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage

I am a geophysicist who has worked with some of the technologies that Mr. Gilmer writes about, and they are not going to save us. My question to Mr. Gilmer is this: if we can exploit the oil that he speaks of, why aren't the oil companies doing it? They are buying back stock, increasing dividends and hoarding cash, but they have not substantially increased exploration budgets. I think oil companies know what Dr. Deffeyes knows; Hubbert's peak will come sooner rather than later.

Kenneth Deffeyes has an engaging entertaining syle and is a gifted teacher. A professor emeritus of geology at Princeton, he was born to an oil family in Oklahoma and worked at Shell during the glory days of M. King Hubbert. This is an oil man, and a top level academic thinker. I earnestly recommend that you read this book if you are interested in energy issues. If you complete the book and understand the details (no small task in some of the chapters), you will have a high level of understanding of the salient details of oil and natural gas exploration, recovery and refining. You will know why major deep ocean oil deposits are extremely unlikely. You will know what a source rock is, and how it must be positioned at the appropriate depth range in the earth to make oil; drilling deeper is not going to help us. In short, you will feel like you have completed a postgraduate course in petroleum geology. For $12 for the paperback version, it's quite a deal. The book deals in hard facts; it has no discernable ideological bent. But is does makes a compelling case that global oil production will peak sometime between 2003 and 2009, and that society will be in for a resulting shock. If you are a doubter, take my challenge and read this book.

While millions of environmentally concerned Americans are ready to vilify on reflex what Molly Ivins flippantly dubs "the oil bidness," Kenneth Deffeyes thinks of the petroleum fields as a place of high spirits and high romance. But, having spent half his life working for Shell, and half of it training later generations of fossil fuel hunters, he is here to break the bad news to us gently. And the news is, the party's over. The days of derring-do among the derricks are just about done.Thirty years ago, U.S. oil production peaked, and has been declining ever since. Shortly, world oil production will hit the same peak, and begin to decline. That doesn't mean there will be no oil left; thirty years after hitting its own peak, the U.S. is still the second largest oil producer in the world. But it does mean that demand will outstrip supply, and that means the economic dislocations of the late 70s - the spiking prices, the long gas lines, the deep recession - will become permanent. Eventually, other sources of energy, both renewables and plentiful fossil fuels like natural gas, will fill in the breach. But it will be a long and painful process, requiring a ton of capital investments in research and in infrastructure that a suddenly poorer first world will be ill able to afford."Shortly", Deffeyes argues, means in one to six years, and probably in the early part of that range. One can quibble with some of his arguments for that timing. With luck, he acknowledges, there may be one significant set of oil fields yet to be discovered, in the South China Sea (unexplored so far because the competing jurisdictions of the several nearby island nations have made contracts hard to nail down.) And I don't think he's given sufficient weight to the fact that all the oil recovery in the Middle East is still "primary", using old-fashioned pumping technology. But if all the quibbles are granted, it only affords the world economy another five or ten years of grace.So, if Deffeyes is wrong, the time to start making those massive investments and changes is today. If he is right, the time to start making them is ten years ago, and all we can accomplish by swift action is to make the period of intense pain a decade or two shorter. Though Professor Deffeyes isn't political enough or impolite enough to say so, Clinton (for all his green talk) failed to provide any leadership to reduce our dependence on petroleum. And his successor, of course, is providing energetic leadership, but all of it is geared to marching us all double-time into still more rapid consumption of what little oil is left. History will remember neither President Slick, nor President Oil Slick, any more kindly than it now remembers Herbert Hoover for fiddling while the fuse that would set off the Great Depression burned. The book is an easy read, short and set in a conversational style that permits the reader to glide through the more technical portions if so inclined. The technical details and the mathemat

Kenneth Deffeyes, Princeton professor and former oil field geologist, tells the story of oil, right up to the beginning of the demise of oil. He takes the methods developed by M. King Hubbard, the man who accurately predicted the peak in U.S. oil production, and applies them to world oil production. The book makes absolutely riveting reading. The first few chapters deal entirely with the source and production of oil. I kept wondering, as I was reading these chapters, what has this to do with Hubbert's Peak and the coming decline in oil production? Then it began to dawn on me, one has to know everything about oil to accurately predict the future production of oil. Deffeyes is that man and he covers every possible base. Many say "Just drill deeper" or "There is oil in the deep ocean", but Deffeyes shows why drilling deeper can yield natural gas but not one drop of oil and why oil from deep ocean sediments is impossible. Deffeyes leaves no stone unturned and covers every possible source of oil.Deffeyes expects the peak in world oil production at around 2005 but says it could come as early as 2003 or as late 2006. There is a fair amount of jitter in the year-to-year production so picking the exact peak is difficult. But he reminds us that the center of the U.S. Best fit curve was 1975 and the actual peak came in 1970. He says however, there is nothing plausible that could postpone the peak until 2009.Of course Kenneth Deffeyes is not the only oil field geologist that is predicting an impending peak in world oil production, Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrere and several others have been doing that for several years. The data supporting the impending peak and decline is sometimes difficult to interpret but Deffeyes lays the data out in undeniable terms and in such a manner that the average layman can understand it.The only problem I had with the book was I felt Deffeyes was overly optimistic as to the effects of the coming decline in world oil production. He sees only a decade or so of difficulties until we get over our dependence on crude oil. Many others however, who have looked more closely at the possibility of alternate sources of energy to replace cheap portable oil, find no possible replacement. And....most of these see nothing short of a worldwide holocaust a few years after the peak. They say the world's six billion people are supported by a network of food production and transport that will be impossible to maintain when oil production begins to drop and the price of the remaining oil begins to rise dramatically.But by all means, BUY THIS BOOK. Not only will it convince you of the inevitability of the impending peak and decline in oil production, but also it will give you the ammunition and data to convince those around you, to convince them and give them time to make preparations for....for something I find too hard to even imagine.