I haven't read the book yet, but here are some preliminary bits of information from reviews, talks, and websites.
"Won't alternate energy sources come to the rescue? Not the current ones, says Goodstein. Like buzzing freshmen, he swaps each away with a casual flick of the wrist (just joking). What about natural gas? Sorry, its Hubbert's peak already occurred thirty years ago. Maybe our hope lies in shale oil, that ancient plant life which hasn't quite been compressed into true oil? Nope, turns out it gives you only as much energy as it took to process it. And how about coal? No luck there either. Coal is dirty, poisonous, and a far worse greenhouse polluter than oil. From the economic standpoint, liquid coal is five times less efficient than oil. Mining this much coal would deplete world reserves within a century and would at best buy us some time. [RJA comment: but some people argue that clean coal technology solves many of the old problems (except, of course, for CO2 emissions) and could last 300 years. Who is right?]
"Even the renewable alternative energy sources provide small solace. Hydroelectric power is currently responsible for 25% of world supply but it can't go any higher. Every economically feasible river is already damned. Wind power is only economic with large subsidies and requires huge farms even to produce intermittent power. There is the possibility of utilizing biomass. I.E., "we grow something and burn it." But Goodstein remarks that this biofuel is really only "political fuel" as the process is actually energy negative. Geothermal sights dry up to quickly. Ten thousand nuclear fission plants could replace oil but would consume uranium reserves in a decade or two. [RJA comment: I would like to see the arithmetic on this.] There are always common photovoltaic cells, those large solar panels. But at current efficiencies of around 10%, half of California would have to be covered with them to replace oil. That's around 2000 times the amount of solar cells that the world has produced so far.
. . .
"I'm going to make a prediction. Civilization will come to an end within a century."
Taken from this web page -- which page at one time was part of the CalTech IT division but seems to have disappeared and is preserved only in Google's cache.
David Goodstein is Caltech vice provost and professor of physics and applied physics.
"In the 1950s, it was not Saudi Arabia but the United States that was the world's greatest producer of oil. Much of our military and industrial might grew out of our giant oil industry, and most people in the oil business thought that this bonanza would go on forever. But there was one gentleman who knew better. He was an oil exploration geologist named Marion King Hubbert."
"In about 1950, Hubbert realized that the trajectory of oil discovery in the continental United States was going to be a classic bell-shaped curve, for the decades from 1910 to 1970, in billions of barrels per year. . . . He also saw that there would be a second bell-shaped curve that would represent production, or consumption, or extraction." [peaking in about 1970]
"for the last quarter century, we've been using oil faster than we have been discovering it."
One such estimate was published in 1998 in Scientific American. It predicts that we will have a worldwide maximum in oil production just about now -- around the middle of the decade 2000-2010.
Taken from this FTW web page