Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage - Revised and Updated Edition - Hardcover

Inhaltsangabe

Were the energy concerns of 2000 a preview of everyone's future? Will gas lines in the coming years make those of 1973 look short? Is the present chaos in oil prices the leading edge of a more serious crisis that will rock national economies around the world? According to Kenneth Deffeyes, a geologist with extensive personal experience in the oil industry, the answer to all of these questions is "yes". World oil production is peaking and will start to fall for good sometime during the first decade of the 21st century. In 1956, geophysicist M. King Hubbert - then working at the Shell research lab in Houston - predicted that US oil production would reach its highest level in the early 1970s. Though roundly criticized by oil experts and economists, Hubbert's prediction came true in 1971. The hundred-year period during which most of the world's oil was discovered became known as Hubbert's Peak - a span of time almost comically shorter than the hundreds of millions of years the oil deposits took to form. Using the same methods that Hubbert used to make his stunningly accurate prediction, Deffeyes finds that a peak in world oil production is less than five years away. And he argues that new exploration and production technologies can't save us. While long-term solutions exist in the form of conservation and alternative energy sources, they probably cannot - and almost certainly will not - be enacted in time to evade short-term catastrophe. Perhaps most surprising is that none of this is news to most specialists and many associated with the petroleum industry. But politicians, the media, and the public at large aren't hearing about it. Deffeyes wants to make sure they do. Generally accessible and filled with anecdotes, his book demonstrates to the general reader why a global energy crisis is just around the corner.

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