Table of Contents

• My Introductory Thoughts
• Prologue
• Part 1 - THE FREE RIDE - sets the stage
  • 1. Lighting the Fire - a short history of energy
  • 2. The Last of the Easy Oil - looks at how much oil is left
  • 3. The Future's So Bright - looks at the hydrogen fuel cell
  • 4. Energy is Power - looks at connections between energy and politics and war
  • 5. Too Hot - looks at climate change
• Part 2 - ON THE ROAD TO NOWHERE - looks at the mechanics of the energy order
  • 6. Give the People What They Want - energy consumption
  • 7. Big Oil Gets Anxious - transformation of the energy business
  • 8. And Now for Something Completely Different - tour of options for the new system
  • 9. Less is More - energy conservation and efficiency
• Part 3 - INTO THE BLUE - charts the promise and peril of our energy future
  • 10. Energy Security - existing energy system already failing
  • 11. The Invisible Hand - the colossal inertia of the current energy order
  • 12. Digging in Our Heels - lays out the terms of the coming struggle
  • 13. How Do We Get There? - a speculative account of the transition to a new energy economy
• Afterword

My Introductory Thoughts

I'm only part way into the book as yet, but here are some preliminary bits of information (covering the Prologue and first two chapters).

Prologue

• 26% of our energy still comes from coal; 24% still comes from natural gas
• "By 2035, the world will use more than twice as much energy as it does today. Demand for oil will jump from the current 80 mln barrels/day to as much as 140 mln barrels/day. [RJA comment: assuming declining world oil production permits this -- it wouldn't per Kunstler] Use of natural gas will climb by over 120%, coal use by nearly 60%. Demand will be especially acute in ... China and India."
• "By 2020, demand for electricity could be 70% higher than today."
• "Historically, shifts from one energy technology to another have proved wrenching."
• "Government ... are steadily delaying any significant move away from the existing energy economy -- thereby ensuring that change, when it occurs, will be all the more sudden and disruptive."
• "each year that energy consumption continues unabated, the end of the current energy system not only becomes more inevitable but appears more likely to occur as a traumatic event"
• "Optimists like the U.S. government believe that peak in oil production cannot occur before 2025 or so . . . Pessimists, by contrast ... believe that a peak may come much sooner -- perhaps as soon as 2005"
• Roberts seems to have done his homework -- has studied Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, India, Japan, Germany, and the U.S. and has travelled extensively interviewing people
• "Americans are the most profligate users of energy in the history of the world"
• "If the U.S. government and its citizens decided to launch a new energy system and have it in place within 20 years, not only would the energy system be built, but the rest of the world would be forced to follow along. Instead, American policymakers are too paralyzed to act"
• "American, it seems, suffer profoundly from what may soon be known as energy illiteracy: most of us understand so little about our energy economy that we have no idea that is has begun falling apart
• "the shape of the next energy economy is being decided right now -- with or without our input"

Part 1 - THE FREE RIDE - sets the stage

1. Lighting the Fire - a short history of energy

• an excellent historical overview
• coal economy replaced wood economy -- coal has 5 times the energy density of wood
• American coal reserves are massive (the largest in the world) -- but didn't replace wood until the end of the Civil War
• one might rename the Industrial Revolution as the Energy Revolution
• the end of coal began in 1901 at Spindletop, Texas (Al Hammil) -- invented the rotary drill
• Henry Ford's Model A in 1903 -- by 1913 a million cars and trucks
• [RJA comment: but I remember house delivery of coal in the 1940s before we switched to oil]
• Rockefeller's Standard Oil brought in the concept of vertical integration -- at one point controlled 90% of US market -- but broken up in 1914 by US antimonopoly laws
• gives a good overview of World War II in terms of oil supplies
• 1951 Iran nationalized its oil industry -- others followed suit -- leading to OPEC
• in 1970 US oil production hit its peak -- "almost overnight, oil had changed from a factor in economic success to a source of economic and political vulnerability"

2. The Last of the Easy Oil - looks at how much oil is left

• calls Colin Campbell, a former Amoco oil geologist, the "éminence grise of the so-called oil pessimists"
• optimists says world won't reach production peak for 50 or 60 or 100 years
• but the optimists' rosy picture "is far from accurate" ("as some energy companies and government agencies tacitly acknowledge")
• "although we will not run out of oil tomorrow, we are nearing the end of ... the easy oil"
• "In theory, the production of oil reaches a peak when half the original supply has been pumped from the ground" [RJA comment: Kunstler says the same thing but I don't understand why the "depletion midpoint" needs to coincide with the start of declining production ("oil production peak")]
• estimates we have used 875 billion barrels since dawn of the oil age -- slightly different from Kunstler's estimate of 1 trillion barrels
• how much oil is left = "proven" plus "undiscovered" [though Kunstler would discount undiscovered since the world has already been so thoroughly searched]
• U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) (which Roberts calls a "leader among the so-called oil optimists") says proven reserves = 1.7 trillion barrels (over half of which are in the Middle East) -- this includes 1 trillion barrels in known reserves plus 700 billion barrels in "reserve additions" (basically, new oil discovered in existing or even abandoned fields)
• USGS says undiscovered = 900 billion barrels -- so proven plus undiscovered = 2.6 trillion barrels (assuming world oil consumption, now at 80 mln barrels/day, continues to grow at 2%/yr, we'd hit our peak somewhere around 2030 or even later if world oil consumption slows
• but Roberts says: "the problem is that both numbers, those for proven and for undiscovered, are doubtful" -- explains the political and economic motivation behind exaggerating reserves
• there were many upward revisions which "Campbell, the Amoco geologist-turned-pessimist" says are "largely bogus" -- "It is obviously absurd to imagine the Iraq, for example, has increased its reserves fourfold since 1980"
• quotes one USGS employee as saying "Statistically, it's unlikely that there is all this 'hidden resource', waiting to be found; [it] is pretty hard to support scientifically."
• Roberts says according to the pessimists, proven plus undiscovered = 1 trillion barrels [just as Kunstler argues] and puts the peak at about 2010 [though Kunstler puts the peak at 2005]
• Roberts says govt of Alberta claims tar sands reserves are equivalent to more than 1 trillion barrels!
• USGS argues that enhance recovery technologies will add another 700 billion barrels of oil to the world's tally of remaining oil [RJA comment: I assume this is the "reserve additions" mentioned above
• "Deep-water oil is touted as the real frontier of the future" (but makes no mention of deep abiogenic oil theories)
• less new oil is to be found in the regions outside OPEC control -- we haven't been able to halt the long-term decline in new discoveries outside OPEC
• "Yet although Russia does have a great deal of oil -- perhaps as much as 200 billion barrels, according to the congenitally optimistic EIA [U.S. Energy Information Administration] -- that is peanuts by comparison with the nearly 850 billion barrels believed to be held by Saudi Arabia and other Arab states"
• experts expect a Russian peak no later than 2015 and non-OPEC oil production could peak by 2015 and OPEC itself might peak by 2025
• quotes Matt Simmons, an oil industry investment banker and depletion expert: "Peaking of oil and gas will occur, if it has already happened, and we will never know when the event has happened until we it in 'in our rear view mirrors'"
• quotes one high-ranking US energy official as saying that the EIA "has put out such overblown numbers, and done it with such arrogance, that it should be statutorily barred from answering questions about oil"
• Simmons believes that the Saudis themselves fear that Saudi Arabia "has very likely gone over its peak; if that's true, then it's a certainty that planet earth has passed its peak of production" [consistent with Kunstler calling it 2005]

3. The Future's So Bright - looks at the hydrogen fuel cell

• a good overview of the background and more recent history of the hydrogen fuel-cell and Ballard -- but doesn't mention alternative fuel cells such as the zinc-air fuel cell being developed by PowerZinc in California and Shanghai
• points out that there are now 750 million cars & trucks roaming the planet -- growing by 50 million a year -- and 90% using oil
• most electric generating plants have idle capacity at off peak times -- "Hydrogen advocates asked: Why not run the plants at full capacity all the time, storing the excess power as liquid hydrogen?" [RJA comment: especially re nuclear generating plants -- or charging other fuel-cells such as zinc-air]
• points out problems with hydrogen -- expensive: more than twice the cost of gasoline and very hard to handle
• quotes Lee Lund, a researcher at Dartmouth College and one of top biofuels experts in the world: saying that biofuels produced from marginal croplands could replace a fifth of U.S. transportation fuel by 2020 [RJA comment: but surely this is too late]
• mentions DaimlerChrysler alliance with Ballard but says "well after 2020 before these vehicles would be hitting the road" [RJA: which is too late]
  • A DaimlerChrysler 2004 webpage about their F-Cell car testing until 2007 -- and a second DaimlerChrysler 2004 webpage on the same subject -- and yet a third DaimlerChrysler webpage on this
• but Shell in 1999 and BP ("Beyond Petroleum" soon after launched hydrogen divisions
  • here is a Shell Hydrogen webpage -- pointing out that was set up in 1999 -- they say that "by 2020, 5-10 million hydrogen powered cars will be on the road, rising to over 50 million by 2030 and approximately 150 million by 2040" [RJA question: is this fast enough?]
  • here is a second Shell Hydrogen webpage in 2005 -- including Jul/05 testimony to the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Energy -- mostly saying need some public-private partnership to accelerate commercialization of the vehicles
  • a very introductory BP hydrogen webpage
• but says hydrogen bubble burst in 2001
• RJA: here is a website about different fuel-cell types: www.fuelcells.org -- including a section on zinc air fuel cells

4. Energy is Power - looks at connections between energy and politics and war

• RJA: this is a whole new subject -- the chapter is good but it convinces me that it would take some years of study to even begin to understand the whole area of oil geopolitics
• U.S. preponderance in oil geopolitics was originally as the world's largest producer and now, that gone, as the world's largest consumer
• the 1990s were the golden years for the oil order -- oil demand had returned in a big way and the world economy was booming (esp in the US and Asia)
• but many saw fundamental flaws: price volatility posed an enromous risk to the fast-growing global economy -- after each of the 6 major oil spikes since WWII global economic activity began to fall within 6 mos -- spikes were costly to the world economy
• also political instability: OPEC members fighting among themselves and cheating on their quotas
• but biggest source of instability is Saudi Arabia -- country's finances in shambles after 1970s fortune depleted by the lavish lifestyles of 15,000 royal princes
• neocon view: "only real risks to American primacy are the threats posed by energy disruption" (and, to a lesser extent, terrorism)
• says Iraq war was clearly about oil -- "even casual observers could see the priority that U.S. forces gave to securing the massive oil fields in Kirkuk"
• Cheney and Rumsfeld "see control of oil as merely part of a much bigger geostrategic vision"
• "For Bush, the lesson to be learned about energy insecurity was not that the West should use less energy, as it did in the early 1980s, but that the West should be willing to make energy more secure and less unpredictable"

5. Too Hot - looks at climate change

Part 2 - ON THE ROAD TO NOWHERE - looks at the mechanics of the energy order

6. Give the People What They Want - energy consumption

7. Big Oil Gets Anxious - transformation of the energy business

8. And Now for Something Completely Different - tour of options for the new system

9. Less is More - energy conservation and efficiency

Part 3 - INTO THE BLUE - charts the promise and peril of our energy future

10. Energy Security - existing energy system already failing

11. The Invisible Hand - the colossal inertia of the current energy order

12. Digging in Our Heels - lays out the terms of the coming struggle

13. How Do We Get There? - a speculative account of the transition to a new energy economy

Afterword