The end of the Age of Oil
David Goodstein
ISBN 0-393-05857-3
Read: 2004 November 18 – 2005 April 3
Reviewed: 2006 February 4
Goodstein is a professor at Caltech, not really an expert in the subject matter directly, but he applies his training and experience in basic physics to the problem of world energy management, particularly as concerns the oncoming crises about a transition from a fossil fuel based world economy to É something else. He also discusses the standard environmental issues, global warming and so forth.
I attended GoodsteinÕs lecture on the subject at JPL in 2005. In answering questions from the audience, one of his replies stands out. Someone in his thirties asked how they should manage the energy part of their retirement portfolio. Goodstein said that you should invest in petroleum rich enterprises in politically stable regions.
Of course, this does not exist. His style is full of such understated humor.
At the end of this lecture, I bought this book from the JPL bookstore, set up conveniently at the exit of von Karman auditorium. I got in the autograph line. I asked, while he was autographing, what was the situation with methanol, with respect to the production versus consumption energy balance. (The question is, doesnÕt it take more energy to make methanol than it provides to the end user and, therefore, isnÕt itÕs popularity more political than rational?) His answer was that the jury was still out. Probably so with corn but probably not so with switch grass, such as is used in Brazil.
IÕve been following this subject under the leadership of Ralph Wallio who, before the turn of the millennium, discovered ŌHubbertÕs PeakĶ and set up what amounts to an online discussion group on the topic. GoodsteinÕs dedication echos RalphÕs sentiments:
ŌTo our children and grandchildren, who will not inherit the riches that we inherited.Ķ
I suppose in a sense that this sentiment is always true. From generation to generation, some form of richness is lost, however, I share GoodsteinÕs and WallioÕs concern that we as a culture do not appreciate the degree to which everything we know is dependent on cheap energy, represented by petroleum in its various refined forms, and the degree to which our society must change (perhaps catastrophically) as a result of this resource entering its inevitable though natural decline.
The book is in five chapters in which Goodstein attempts to state the problem, dispel misunderstandings about how energy works, describes various forms of energy storage and transmission, talk about entropy and heat engines, basic to any understanding of uses of mechanical energy, and finally, ways of addressing the problem of one form of energy decline.
He is also concerned about the CO2 being dumped
into the metastable earth environment, an uncontrolled experiment of
potentially vast but unpredictable consequences. This was the big piece of new information that I picked up
from the lecture and the book. The
earth is indeed a stable, self-correcting system. For instance, as things warm up, more water vapor enters the
system (clouds), reflecting off more energy, leading to cooling and a natural
balance. Problem is, the system is
not unconditionally stable, as I had, in ignorance, believed. It is Ōmeta-stable,Ķ meaning that there
are different states of stability that are reachable. It could be a catastrophe (would be to life as we know it) to somehow flip the world
into a different metastable state!
The basic physics shows that, if the earth had no greenhouse
now, the temperature would stabilize at about 0 F, just from the sunÕs energy
input and re-radiation. All water
would be frozen. That is one of
the metastable states that we would like to avoid. Life would not survive here under such conditions, so we
would like to keep the greenhouse stability that we now enjoy about the same as
it is. Pumping all possible CO2
into the atmosphere is not a good way to ensure that. There are also fears that a trip could go the other way;
that the greenhouse could go to a much warmer metastable state. That, too, would be unpleasant.
Claims are made that GoodsteinÕs explanation of entropy is
unusually clear. Although I have
been formally trained in thermodynamics and therefore the concept of entropy,
it has never been crystal clear to me in all detail, nor is it now after
carefully reading GoodsteinÕs chapter on the subject. Perhaps he is more accustomed to Caltech undergraduate
students.
He does have a good, standard explanation of HubbertÕs
peak. Essentially it goes like this. In the 1950s King Hubbert (pronounced
ŌhubĶ) was a geologist working for an oil company and he predicted from new
discovery data that oil production would peak in North America around 1970,
production levels following discoveries by 20-30 years. Although Hubbert was not believed at
the time, his prediction turned out to be alarmingly and precisely correct,
posthumously. The North American
cartel was controlled at the time by the Texas Railroad Commission, which set
pumping allowances in state. In early
1970, the allowance went to 100% meaning that producers could pump all they
wanted, meaning that production limitations were no longer needed to stabilize
the price, meaning that control of domestic pricing had been lost.
At this point North America began importing oil from
elsewhere in order to recapture stability and control, mostly from the Middle
East. Shortly OPEC (Organization
of Petroleum Exporting Countries) was formed and has had the throttle ever
since. What is now predicted by
extrapolation from the HubbertÕs Peak methodology is world production
levels. Current thinking is that
there are about two trillion barrels of oil available in the world, of which
about one trillion has been produced (as of about 2005), meaning that the world
itself is now at peak and production limits will no longer be able to control
prices globally. As a corollary,
it is thought that production promises from the big producers, particularly in
the Middle East are probably not realizable.
Having read a great deal on this subject, I didnÕt pick up
much new from Out of Gas on this and, in
fact, in the last paragraphs, I am probably saying more than Goodstein himself
did.
Out of Gas is
probably a good introduction to the subject for any High School graduate who is
otherwise new to the issue. On
that basis, IÕll start loaning out my copy to such people now. It would be great if most of our
leading politicians had at least rudimentary understanding of this
material! We fear that political
expertise is not in hard physics and that their attitudes are overwhelmed by
the noise of oil company lobbying.
But, again, I digress.