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

1. It manages to consolidate a lot of things into one single book. The California Power shortage, for example was one great reading section. 2. The book is very easy to read (and reread). A lot of books suffer from being verbose and overwrought with detail. Not so for this book. 3. One of the best parts of the whole book was calculating the costs (in terms of excess carbon) of using corn for fuel. They pointed out that trees soak up more carbon than corn stalk and so to plow under land to plant corn would actually end up in MORE carbon being put into the atmosphere. 4. It was also great to know that: There is extant technology that is held back by excessive regulation/ bureaucracy/ political bickering. One point that they used to illustrat this was the fact that no one wants Uranium powered electricity in their backyard, but that it acutally has the smallest carbon footprint of any of the fuels available today. One thing that I could have done with would have been an appendix inserted into the back of the book to show how the authors' calculations were made and their values derived. This would have been helpful for a lot of people.

Peter Huber and Mark P. Mills--two master iconoclasts have teamed up to write a fascinating and indeed visionary book on the capture and release of energy in our industrialized society. The book is all the more entertaining for the fact that it shatters many energy myths in an unapologetic and politically incorrect fashion. This straight-shooting return to truthfulness is a welcome breath of fresh air guaranteed to irritate the automatons of the environmental-left. To be specific, the authors dispel six myths about energy: 1) why the demand for energy will never decrease 2) why "energy waste" (actually refinement to more intensive forms) is beneficial--a good thing 3) why more efficient cars lead to a higher demand for energy 4) why the energy supply is essentially infinite 5) why gasoline prices are less important now than in the past 6) and why hybrid engines will likely lead to increased use of coal and nuclear fuels On each point the authors make their case using a rigorous, original analysis. Throughout the book, the authors quantify their claims with hard numbers and graphical information, something that is sorely lacking in most articles and texts on this topic. The authors dispel many other myths with hard facts and inescapable logic. For example, we learn that a century and a half ago, a pioneering American family required 40 acres and a mule in order to survive. This acreage was needed in order to generate enough energy in the form of crops and pasture to fuel and obtain useful work from the livestock. Today, we need far less land per person because we derive our energy from beneath the soil in the form of energy-intensive petroleum products. This offers a vastly higher energy per unit volume, compared to the bio-solar energy available to our ancestors. As a result, modern improvements in agricultural productivity have reduced the number of acres harvested by 40 million acres today, compared to 150 years ago. Another benefit is more trees and timber today than in 1920, a low-point in US history. The authors also state that, at current trends, we will have more trees within 20 years than when the country was founded. Using hard numbers, they continually make the point that the old solar-carbohydrate-fueled economy was much worse for the atmosphere than the hydro-carbon-fueled economy that has replaced it today. Huber and Mills also discuss three inescapable economic-political-technical facts: 1) The demand for electricity has been rising ever since Edison invented the light bulb, and it will go on rising as a natural part of human evolution in the quest for ever more energy. 2) No politician will ever permit the power grid to go dark from lack of energy, as this would amount to political suicide. 3) It is an undeniable fact that coal, nuclear, and gas electrical plants produce enormous amounts of reliable power in a relatively small amount of space, while solar and wind power don't even come close. The next few decades will see eve

No reviewer can say that this is a perfect book, perfectly organized, etc. HOWEVER, what the authors have to say must be said. And what they say must be understood, and quickly. They do a great job in this book of blowing away all the myths and sloganeering associated with power and energy. The whole face of power and how it is used in the world is changing. Policy makers in Washington, DC, have fallen completely behind, and our nation will fall by the wayside, too, if we do not understand the concepts described in this book. The book is well-written, but tends to repeat itself. This is acceptable to me as a reader, because I understand that the authors are trying to make several points very clear and have to pound them in over and over. Some readers may find that irritating. This book helped me to remember something I learned in school, but had lost touch with: there is a Second Law of Thermodynamics, and we ignore it at our peril. If we, or any society, decides to pass on some important source of power, don't worry, someone else will come along and use it instead. Huber has said this over and over: if someone "conserves energy", such as using less gasoline, someone else will be happy to take that energy for themselves. For instance, if the United States decides to not use certain energy sources for environmental reasons, the Chinese have no problem using that source for their economy. Poverty and "clean-ness" go hand in hand. If one person voluntarily wishes to live in poverty, by all means go ahead. However, every other human on the planet will gladly get out of poverty.

If you have read many "Peak Oil" books, you will be used to reading a lot of doom and gloom. You will not find that in the Bottomless Well. Instead, Huber and Mills treat peak oil as just the latest chapter in an ongoing energy saga. A chapter or two may describe a little turmoil, but we will keep going toward a happy ending. Initially, I was skeptical of that rather rosy view. Of course our oil is running out. We are burning it millions of times faster than the earth can create it. How can the oil well be bottomless? The answer is that there is a bottom to oil wells, but not to energy. As Huber and Mills point out, the problem of energy now is not so much the fuel we use to generate energy, but how we refine that energy. I will not try to summarize the key arguments in the Bottomless Well. I could not do them justice. Let me just say that this book impressed me with both the arguments made here, and the facts that are assembled to support the argument. From James Watt to Sadi Carnot to Henry Ford, you will hear how each of these people have contributed to our understanding of our energy problem, and how to solve it. There's nothing simplistic or superficial about this book. Whether you agree that we will never run out of energy or not, reading The Bottomless Well will be valuable both for the arguments and the information it contains. And the writing is tight and easy to grasp. The book reads almost like a good novel. (Of course, for some that might not be what they want from a book like this. Some probably prefer something heavier and dense.) Unless you feel the need to read only the doom and gloom side of the "Peak Oil" debate, you can't miss with The Bottomless Well.