As I’m sure you can tell, aside from being interested in ways to increase a car’s fuel economy, I’m also pretty interested in the price of crude oil and the development of alternative fuels.
The other day while I was at the library, I picked up a copy of Out of Gas – The End of the Age of Oil
I picked this book up expecting a slight slant towards conservationism and the need for alternative fuels, however after reading the book, found it to be much more of a dooms day prognostication.
“The world will soon start to run of conventionally produced, cheap oil. If we manage somehow to overcome that shock by shifting the burden to coal and natural gas, the two other primary fossil fuels, life may go on more or less as it has been – until we start to run out of all fossil fuels by the end of this century. And by the time we have burned up all that fuel, we may well have rendered the planet unfit for human life. Even if human life does go on, civilization as we know it will not survive, unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels.”
And that’s just the first paragraph!
Anyway, the book paints a pretty bleak picture of what our future might look like. Goodstein is of the opinion (and he provides plenty of facts to back it up) that the world has used over half of its available oil, and with exponentially higher demand from countries like China and India, not to mention the Industrialized World, it appears we’re going to go through the second half much faster than we did the first half.
One of the interesting things I found while reading the book is the case for more nuclear power plants. The whole idea of nuclear power makes me very uneasy (see Three Mile Island and Chernobyl), so I would much rather focus on other forms of “alternative” energy.
Overall, I thought this was a good read, and if you’re interested in learning more about the world’s oil reserves and what might happen if we run out of oil, I would highly recommend picking up this book.