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When Oil Peaked
Book

When Oil Peaked

Kenneth S. Deffeyes
Hill and Wang, 2010
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Comprehensive
  • Innovative
  • Scientific

Recommendation

Forecasting the date of peak oil production is serious business, and this short book tackles the predictive methodology, geology, economics and mathematics head-on. Princeton professor emeritus Kenneth Deffeyes presents the techniques used by petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert to validate his prediction as to when oil production would peak. Deffeyes, who worked with Hubbert, further validates Hubbert’s work, as he did in his earlier book, Hubbert’s Peak. He presents the pros and cons of various alternative energy sources, how oil prices contributed to the recent global recession and the status of the oil industry today. This is a technical book; Deffeyes is an engineer, geologist and oil heavyweight, and he makes detailed presentations requiring advanced knowledge not provided in the text. getAbstract considers this an important text and recommends it to people interested in the most rigorous assessment of future energy trends and climate change.

Summary

No Horn of Plenty

Experts widely credit American geologist M. King Hubbert (1903-1989) with analyzing when the world’s oil production would peak. Hubbert’s acolytes (“Hubbertians”) follow his methods and now believe global oil production peaked in 2005. Data shows that, since 2005, there has been no increase in world oil production.

In May 2005, crude oil cost $44 a barrel; by July 2008, it cost $147 per barrel. Despite dramatically higher prices, oil supplies did not increase. This focused attention on Hubbert’s early analysis. He began his research in 1956 when he set out to calculate recoverable US oil reserves. Using estimates from two other petroleum geologists, Hubert theorized that a graph of US oil production would show 100 years of early, fast growth to the peak, followed by another 100 years of decreasing production.

Hubbert theorized that finding oil was dependent on the amount of undiscovered oil. Richard Nehring, a Hubbert critic, wrote a series of articles in 2006 asserting that Hubbert had utilized a flawed model. One problem concerned the definition of “discovery” and its meaning within the oil industry. Hubbert used this term to mean the total...

About the Author

Kenneth S. Deffeyes, a former researcher for Shell Oil, is professor emeritus of geology at Princeton University.

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