The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Oil: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

This is very close to being a science book, but the topic keeps it from being strictly a science book. The topic is necessarily conjecture about how we will meet future energy needs. The authors, however, are honest about what is conjecture on their part and what is science, and point to the recent development of inexpensive LED lighting as an example of how long-term plans to save energy (by investing in flourescent lighting) end up being foiled by new technological developments. Their primary suggestion, with regard to energy policy over the next few years, is to see what new technology develops and adapt to it, rather than take our current technological knowledge and assume that it will apply 30 years from now. This is in stark contrast to similar books that attempt to use current scientific and technological knowledge to predict doom for the world with remarkable confidence.

The most engaging and scientific part of the book is the discussion of efficiency and energy and entropy. Most of the author's optimistic conclusions arise from their observations made here. Efficiency often ends up being misused, by their reasoning, to make two incorrect conclusions about energy policy. One such incorrect conclusion is that the US economy makes very, very inefficient use of its energy. To the contrary, such a conclusion assumes that somehow energy in coal form is equivalent to energy in electrical form is equivalent to energy running a laptop PC. The authors argue, convincingly, that energy in coal form is mostly useless, and part of it gets spent reversing entropy enough to generate electricity, and again in the PC, part of it is spent keeping the processor cool enough to actually work. The energy spent in the purification process is not "waste," hence their subtitle "the virtue of waste." That is not to say that figuring out how to spend less energy in the conversion process is undesirable, but it will always be there, and it will always be a fairly high percentage. (The most efficient process ever devised was a rocket engine, about 60% efficient.)

The second aspect of efficiency that the authors point out is that designing more efficient processes does not, overall, save energy. When processes become cheap and easy, they get used more, and demanded more, hence the PC explosion since 1980. Similarly, cars were made more efficient, and thus it became cheaper and easier to drive more often, so we all did. Energy use exploded with more efficiency, not less.

Where the authors enter the policy and philosophical realm, these ideas about efficiency and entropy and "ordered energy" are used to generate a general picture about how humanity has progressed from earlier times, giving reason for optimism into the future. The thesis is fairly simple: using energy enables us to gain more energy, and we don't run out of fuel because what we are really looking for isn't more fuel but more useful energy. Before electrical power became standard, the demise of our forests was the dire prediction, but they've been growing back since electricity became ubiquitous. In 1910, we spent 27% of farmland just to "fuel" our horses for transportation; now, our entire transportation grid, including roads, oil wells, refineries, and so on uses less land than that, while moving orders of magnitude more people and goods. Their philosophical analysis: we use far more dense, ordered energy, which enables us to preserve the environment more efficiently as well as do what we want more efficiently. There is no -objective- reason to predict that this trend would end in some fuel crisis, and every fuel crisis of doom prediction has proven false. Technology has always provided a new way of gaining energy efficiently. We can't predict how it will handle the next step, but there is no reason to believe that it won't do so beyond one's own natural pessimism.

The strength of this book is that it doesn't read like Michael Moore or Ann Coulter, but deals with issues from solid science and pragmatic principles. It definitely leans toward the right side of the political spectrum, mostly in a libertarian way. It takes environmental concerns seriously, though not as seriously as environmental activists would like. The issue of global warming is addressed tangentially; addressing it directly would be its own book. They do not dismiss the idea of anthropogenic CO2 causing global warming out of hand, but rather point out technological ways of eliminating CO2 from emissions while still using coal and oil as primary sources of fuel. They also point out that the amount of land needed to supply our energy needs with current wind/solar technologies would be prohibitive; a power plant plus coal mine takes up very much less space than fields of windmills or huge arrays of solar panels, greatly increasing humanity's "footprint" on the earth. The current technical state of fuel cells is discussed fairly thoroughly, along with reasonable speculation about the future of automobile technologies. Further, they point out that if less CO2 emissions is a primary goal, then we should seriously consider further development of safe nuclear power. They don't advocate it, per se, but rather point out that it is a technological option.

These technical discussions alone are worth the price of the book. I love it that they quote Richard Feynman and Sadi Carnot; more pretentious authors would quote Einstein or Newton in an attempt to sound respectable. Feynman had a remarkably keen and common-sense approach to science and physics, which the authors use to their advantage.

The authors write no particular prescription for our energy issues, except to point out that no predicted crisis has ever come to pass, and that we probably shouldn't write regulations based on current technology in an attempt to speed the development of future technology. Fuel cells are all well and good, but basing our current policy on them before the technology has become economical isn't practical, and might get in the way of other, more useful technologies that we don't even know about, yet.

Overall, I find this an honest expression of the optimistic side of the energy debate, and is therefore a good source of material for those interested, whether they agree or disagree with the conclusions.

In this breezy and somewhat obtuse tome of energy babble Huber and Mills enthuse about an endless supply of energy with a kind of breathless giddiness that would shame even the late economist Julian Simon, author of the notion of perpetual economic growth. Essentially what Huber and Mills are telling us is this: we will not run out of energy until the atoms of the universe dissipate into the final stage of entropy some trillions of years from now.

More immediately, as the oil patch runs dry we will convert the hybrid-electric engine (now coming hugely onto market) to the electric engine, which will get its power from electricity generated from coal and nuclear plants, and when we run out of coal and uranium, fusion will be practical and then something else--after all, matter is energy and vice-versa, and with a sufficiently advanced technology, we should be able to extract the energy even in a lump of rock.

They are right, we are not about to run out of energy. I give them a "duh" on that. The sun still has five billion years to go. Furthermore, energy is really just an exploitable contrivance between the relatively hot and the relatively cold. What is important, as the authors never tire of mentioning, is the "ordering" of energy. That is, how energy can be concentrated and aimed at some kind of useful enterprise, such as a laser beam or a logic gate in a computer and not dissipated into the atmosphere as heat. (Although they insist that this dissipation, this "waste," is not only okay, but to be celebrated as evidence of our technological prowess. What they should be saying is that the less we dissipate, the less we pollute, the more technologically adept we are.)

Here's another of their pronouncements: "As we have seen, most of the energy we consume is used to process and purify energy itself." This quote is from page 138, but you'll find essentially the same expression several other places in the book. In fact, there is a lot of deliberate repetition as though the authors are giving a didactic seminar to some corporation's employees (or massaging the CEO)--which is what I suspect they sometimes do. This may account for the fact that they often sound like they want to stand up and shout: "American workers you are the most productive in the world--rejoice! Now get back to work."

Yes, most of the energy we consume is used to process and purify energy itself. Ergo, the more energy we use the more energy we use. Or if that isn't clear, try this: energy use increases because energy use increases.

This tautology is not without (again) its didactic merit. The first large-scale use of the coal-powered steam engine was to pump water out of coal mines. In other words, energy was used to gain more energy.

In the same vein (sorry), on page 136 the authors have a graph showing that the United States, the wealthiest nation on earth, has the highest per capita energy consumption while lesser nations are less wealthy and use less energy. The authors conclude, "The more energy a nation uses, the richer it gets."

A tautology employed to catch our eye is one thing, but confounding cause with effect is quite another. Measuring energy use is already measuring wealth. Wealth and energy use are positively correlated because they are inseparable. People are poor in Bangladesh not because they don't use enough energy. They don't use enough energy because they can't afford to.

The real reason per capita energy use has increased in this country is because we have gotten wealthier. And the reason we have gotten wealthier is mostly related to globalization and free trade, to increased productivity because of technological advances, to education and science, to the greater employment of women in the workplace, and to the use of cheap labor, both from poorly paid illegal immigrants and relatively cheap outsourced labor. This is not to mention the exploitation of the natural resources of other countries and indirectly their cheap labor.

Another "point" Huber and Mills make is that a greater use of energy in, for example, gas-guzzling SUVs is not necessarily wasteful since more powerful engines using more fuel gain for their users time. Yes, if you go 90 miles per hour you will get where you're going sooner than if you chug along at 65--that is, unless you're on the freeway at rush hour.

There are a few slurs in the book aimed at people the authors don't think are too bright, such as greens and environmentalists. One of those slurs with the most ironic quality is the one aimed at George Orwell. After attempting to dismiss Orwell's dystopian vision in "1984," the authors write that all kinds of non-dystopian things were happening "While Orwell was typing..." (p. 135) The implication one gets is that Huber and Mills are writing, composing and edifying while George Orwell was only "typing." The irony is not so much that these two gentlemen are not in the same league as Orwell as writers and thinkers, but that Orwell's vision is upon us this very day with poverty, pollution and perpetual war, whether Huber and Mills notice it or not.

One more point about which the authors are dead on right. We won't run out of oil because as oil becomes scarce its price will no longer be competitive with other energy sources and so there will always be some crude left in the ground. QED: we won't run out of oil.

If you want to know about peak oil, read Beyond Oil (2005) by Kenneth S. Deffeyes. If you want a contretemps to the views of Huber and Mills, I recommend Brian Czech's Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train (2000). And if you're interested in the prospect for a hydrogen economy, The Hype about Hydrogen (2004) by Joseph J. Romm is excellent.

Those who have an interest in energy questions in general and so-called "peak oil" in particular may find the book, The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, The Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy by Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mills, to be an interesting object of study on several levels.

Immediately one is stuck by the very cover of the book. "Bottomless wells?" "Endless energy?" "Waste is Virtuous?" Wow. It also features a gasoline nozzle spouting copious amounts of gas into a deep pool of it, suggesting cornucopian reserves of the stuff.

Have we been holding back all this time? Have we been flagellating ourselves to conserve and find alternatives for no good reason? Are we finally free from all of those nay saying curmudgeons? Is it time to widen the garage and get that shiny new Hummer we always wanted, critics be damned?

Well, not so fast.

Upon reading the book, one sees that although many of the claims in it are sensible enough, they are not quite as sensational as they first seemed on the cover. Probably the quickest way to illustrate this is by taking each phrase of the title and applying a bit of translation based on the contents of the book.

Phrase: "The Virtue of Waste"

Translation: "Waste" energy (e.g. heat, light, etc. not put to what humans deem "useful" work) is an everyday part of the use of any energy and in the refinement of energy (say, crude oil into gasoline.) This is decidedly not news to anyone. This has nothing to do with human ethical considerations of whether you should buy a Hummer, drive a tractor-trailer to work or just light up a swimming pool of gasoline for the pyromaniac pleasure of watching a mushroom cloud explosion. Its about a fundamental law of physics that no one could disobey if they wanted to. Describing this as "virtue" is a little bit strange, to say the least.

A really great point the book makes, however, is that conservation is useless. That's right. Useless. Until a scaling back on an absolutely universal scale is achieved, for every bit of fuel saved, it will be spent somewhere else. Among other factors, when someone saves money at the pump, they spend it at the store. Energy is consumed either way.

As an aside, much of this discussion centered on the concept of "entropy". A slight mark against their usage of the term is that they cast it as a measure of order and disorder. It is my (admittedly limited) understanding that this conception of entropy is somewhat ancient and has fallen out of favor. It is more about energy dispersion than any notion of order/disorder. For example, entropy can increase while geometric "order" also increases, such as in a spontaneous crystallization. Be this as it may, the thrust of their arguments is still understandable, though some rigor may possibly be lacking.

Phrase: "The Twilight of Fuel"

Translation: We spend the great majority of our energy and money refining energy and directing to toward a "useful" purpose. In the end, only a small fraction of energy is used for, say, getting us to the market. Also, raw energy (e.g. crude oil) has been so cheap until now, that the cost of buying it is a relatively small and continually shrinking fraction of the cost of our increasingly sophisticated usage of it. Again, no great news bulletin here, and the books authors themselves occasionally do let it slip that this doesn't make raw energy stores any less crucial to the whole process. No raw energy stores, no more "increasingly sophisticated" uses for it, and no more marginalizing of the cost of raw fuel, since it isn't even there to be marginalized.

Phrases: "The Bottomless Well" and "Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy"

Translation: Here they get almost metaphysical. They make the general claim that "the more energy we use, the more we get". In one sense this is certainly true, in that we use energy and smarts to get more energy. But one could just as easily describe the history of energy thusly: "When we find it, we eventually exploit it if we can." So far we've found energy, not because we absolutely had to, but because we just did. Then we exploited it. Today we find ourselves shackled to certain forms and usages of energy that we really do now depend on. We are compelled to find a way forward whether there really is one or not. This is an important distinction the authors appear to ignore.

Also, the "bottomless well" is not so much oil or gas, despite the word-imagery and cover art to the contrary, and despite the usual talk about how technology allows us to find more of it. The real bottomless well in the book appears to be solar energy. Essentially, the book talks about eventually moving to a hydrogen economy or possibly one based in coal/electricity or other mixtures. Well, a lot of people are talking about this and the book does nothing to advance any of these things, nor does it make it any more clear when it will all happen.

There is an interesting discussion about evolving the automobile toward an electric drive train so a battery, fuel cell or combustion engine can be easily swapped in or out. But these ideas are developed rather on the surface and not in much depth, and others have gone to great lengths proposing such things.

There really isn't any discussion at all on the controversy surrounding the issues of peak oil or the time frame for its occurrence, or how much overlap between peak oil and a new energy regime there will be for various publicly or privately funded scenarios. There is a general faith that "the market will provide" infused throughout the book, however. But as I said above, the market provision of past revolutions in energy source/consumption/usage happened in eras when they were not needed and provided conveniences/advantages which were relative novelties at first. Today's world cannot move forward without such things, which have grown from mere curiosities into vital life and death necessities.

Phrase: "The more energy we spend the more we get."

Translation: To arrive at this, they combine the ideas of the primacy of "logic" to the idea of energy spent in exploration and extraction to show how we are much better at finding and exploiting resources like oil than ever before. Thus, it is getting cheaper to produce. They cite the fact that energy has gotten cheaper over time as proof that it must be getting more abundant -- or something like that.

But first, this flies in the face of the book's own claims that most of the cost of energy - so far, anyway -- is in its processing. If processing is cheaper, naturally so will the cost of "fuel at the pump" be, as long as there are enough raw resources to meet demand. But that's the kicker; this doesn't automatically mean that reserves are in fact growing. They could be dead right that we're more efficient about finding and getting resources - shooting fewer "blanks" as it were -- but then conveniently miss the fact that we're still not finding increasingly more of it. Once you've picked the low-hanging fruit, it is of the essence that your technology and skill is needed to get the harder stuff at reasonable cost and avoid drilling "dry" wells, to put it crudely. These efficiencies do not necessarily mean equally greater discoveries and reserves. It may be so, but it isn't a necessary fact.

Given what I have already read on this subject, it seems clear that they are not only looking at the data differently, but that they are regarding completely different data entirely. Far from dealing with the warnings of certain energy experts, they are more or less sidestepping those concerns by whipping up some views that seem entirely beside the point.

So, in the end, although there is much in the book that is not at all objectionable and even interesting, I found the book falling a bit short of the grand claims on its cover.