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 enlarge | Authors: Brian Hicks, Chris Nelder
Publisher: Wiley
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
Buy New: $15.48
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Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 30581
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 286
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3
ISBN: 0470127368
Dewey Decimal Number: 333.823
EAN: 9780470127360
ASIN: 0470127368
Publication Date: May 2, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
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| Customer Reviews:
 excellent book July 15, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is an excellent book. In a very comprehensive manner the writers explain why cheap oil really has come to an end and which alternatives do have a change te partially replace oil and why. For every possible alternative for oil they subsequently explain which companies are investment opportunities and which ones are not and why. Naturally all their predictions represent views into the unknown future. However after their logic explanations the future seems to be a little less unknown.
An easy and very interesting read.
 Drilling & Nukes Now June 30, 2008
5 out of 10 found this review helpful
Comments on Chris Nelder quotes.
Re: "Clean" coal? Commercially, it doesn't exist yet, and it probably won't exist in any significant measure for several decades."
After my wife and I recently contracted a sinus infection in China (related to breathing pollution from coal-fired plants), we stayed next door to a coal-fired electric generation plant in Okinawa. Its elaborate smoke-free stack emitted no pollution. Why was it built if not economical in the total sense of the word (before $140 per barrel)?
Re: "Obama's call for a complete overhaul of our national energy policy (if you could even call it that)? Now we're talking. I don't know that he could or would pull it off, but it's definitely the right idea."
How do you retain a semblance of individual freedom and the efficiency of regulated free markets, and have a centraly planned economy like that from which China is at last emerging? Why won't your or "Obama's call for a complete overhaul of our national energy policy" be another great-leap-forward disaster like China's? Will not legally mandated energy policies make us uncompetitive with China, Russia, and other countries?
Re: "Drill offshore and ANWR as soon as possible? Bad idea. I say this not for environmental reasons, but simply from an investing perspective. It won't help very much or for very long, it will take decades to come to market and it will only put us farther out on the limb of fossil fuel dependency. It makes far more financial sense to burn somebody else's oil for as long as possible, and save some of our own for a rainy day, when it will be in much greater demand and much more valuable. Judging from the gathering storm clouds of unstoppable oil prices and declining global oil exports, that rainy day is most certainly coming."
Doesn't "save some for a rainy day" "only put us farther out on the limb of fossil fuel dependency"? And, if "it will take decades to come to market," sholdn't to be ready be ready for "a rainy day"?
Re: "A hundred new nuclear reactors? Never going to happen. We're going to be lucky to replace the existing ones, many of which are nearing the ends of their planned life spans."
I don't find "Never going to happen" a very informative explanation. The US already generates 20% of its electricity from nuclear power and France generates 80%. With $140 oil and electric cars and commuter trains fast coming, replacing old nuclear plants and building new ones is inevitably "going to happen." And why shouldn't it?
Why do you not mention the underlying problem of both energy and environment - unsustainable population growth (doubled in last 50 years).
 worthwhile but has some weaknesses June 24, 2008
34 out of 34 found this review helpful
First of all, as to the reviewer who advised the authors should question the environmental impact of our voracious appetite for energy:
The human race could adopt a simpler life. The only way that can happen is if we have a massive die-off of most of the human population. Also, it would be a society where people die young due to lack of modern-day health care, and so forth.
I believe the assumption the authors have made regarding energy demand are sound. People WANT to live what they perceive to be a better life. Some of the aspects of such a life are: advanced health care, the ability to travel, the ability to have a career involving challenging intellectual pursuits, as opposed to having to devote one's life to doing grunt work in order to put food on one's own table.
I am totally prejudiced on this matter. I believe the amenties of modern society have been of tremendous benefit to me. (frankly, if I had lived in older days, due to my physical frailties, I no doubt would have died long ago).
Now a few people may prefer the simpler life, but the vast majority of the people of the world want the amenities that we in the developed world have. I don't see the people of China saying, "hey, we'd rather spend our lives harvesting rice and living in mud huts".
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OK, so much for the rant, now on to my review.
The book is a good overview of the peak oil situation. For those not familiar with peak oil, it provides a lot of the fundamental facts that those who have studied this issue have discovered.
For example, the fact that once we can no longer run our society on fossil fuels, IF there is a path to a comparable standard of living in the future, the mainstay of our energy use will be in the form of electricity.
There are a couple of beefs I have with the book, though, which led me not to give it 5 stars.
1). It really is essentially a book about peak oil, not investing. Upon reading the book, it seems clear to me that the book is motivated primarily by the desire to expand awareness of the peak oil problem to a broader cross-section of the public, not to provide people investment ideas for how to profit from the transition. And that is all to the good in my view, because I think the former is a much more important goal. So the title strikes me as a bit disingenuous, perhaps trying to snare people out to make a buck on alternative energy and then give them a tutorial on peak oil, with the names of a few companies thrown in in order to justify the title of the book.
In my case both causes interest me. I am retired and I am spending some of my time trying to become knowledgable about peak oil in case I can find a way to do anything constructive to help fix the problem. And, I am also an investor, and focused heavily on commodities.
I tend to be skeptical about investing in new technologies, however, because it seems to me it is very hard to anticipate who the real winners are going to turn out to be, and stocks in hot new areas that seem to hold promise for solving important problems of society (the biggest of which is energy) tend to be bid up to sky high prices and thus are extremely risky. One specific mention was about the oil refiners like Valero who can process heavy sour crude. Well, right now the refiners are in the dumpster due to low crack spreads, so who knows maybe Valero is a good buy right now (I have been on the fence about buying some myself). On the other hand, the oil producing nations are seeking to do more of the downstream processing of oil themselves. I can't remember whether the book mentions this, I think it probably does. The Middle East states have a population explosion and need jobs for their huge population of young people. So they want to build refineries and sell us gasoline instead of oil.
Hence, I think there is no guarantee that US refiners will even have oil to process in the future. When I hear Bush talk about how we need to build more refineries, well it's no more idiotic than most all the other garbage you are hearing from the politicians, but does Bush realize that the oil producing nations are building refineries and want to just sell us finished products like gasoline? (in his defense, I am sure McCain and Obama are equally clueless on that)
Another point, before I forget: The reviewer that said the book was US centric I do agree had a good point. I live in the US and an pretty US centric myself, but I do recall thinking a couple times while reading the book that in some places it focused on the US when it should have been focusing globally.
Now, my last criticism and perhaps biggest: The authors have a definite bias for renewables and against fossil fuels and nuclear.
Now in the long run I totally agree that we need to switch over to renewables because the nonrenewables won't be there any more.
However, the authors express all the pitfalls in terms of cost, timetables, etc. associated with the big existing sources of energy with great zeal, while they speak glowingly about renewables with very little discussion of the huge pitfalls and challenges.
The most obvious example is that they say very little about the fact that since most renewables produce intermittently (when the wind blows, when the sun shines), for us to transition to a future based on renewable energy requires the development of massive energy storage facilities. And I would say that right now even though renewable sources such as large-scale solar generation are not particularly far along in implementation, large-scale energy storage is at a far earlier stage of infancy. So in my view the development of large-scale energy storage is liable to be an even bigger challenge than the development of large-scale renewable energy production facilities.
But all in all, it was nevertheless a very good book. It covers the issues associated with peak oil to a moderate level, so it is perfect for someone new to peak oil to get a solid grounding in most of the important issues, and someone who has already studied the issue somewhat is liable to learn a few new things from the book as I did.
An Energy Primer for those looking for an overview June 24, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The book subject is an important and vital subject on the future of energy prospects. The 'profit' areas of the book lists several companies with good prospects for investing. This should be taken as a list of companies and stocks to study before investing. The authors quote noted authorities as Matthew Simmons and several others giving credibility to their writings.
Some of the energy possibilities as oil shale, tar sands and coal-to-liquids receive something less than in-depth treatment. It is not easy to predict which energy resource may be the preferred energy with advantages as economically reasonable, non-polluting and long-lasting. One statement on page 226 may be insightful, "Short of everyone taking up the energy lifestyle of the Amish (although it would be a great thing if they did)" may not be the reflection of many Americans and other people of the world. My belief is that solutions will come because of necessity.
Bill Turnage
Nearly But Not Quite June 24, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Hicks & Nelder have written a highly informative if North American centric essay with respect to the "peak oil" question and leave the writer in no doubt that the world is in deep energy trouble. They detail the mainstream energy alternatives and rightly write off the hype surrounding the Canadian tar sands solution as environmentaly unsustainable and costly. They further assess "alternative" solutions like solar, wind etc as many years off being a real solution to the real time collapse of oil as our base energy supply. However they also write of the continued use of fossil fuel as not sustainable due inability to sequest CO2 - which is not the case. Unfortunately like most US scribes they rarely recognise or acknowledge technology advances going on outside of the US of A. Australia for example has made substantial advances in "clean coal" technology, particularly in brown coal, with the major power stations in the State of Victoria about to turn to such technology with savings of up to 60% in CO2 emissions. Shell/Anglo American, Victoria Coal Resources, ESI and other companies are about to start a huge expansion of brown coal mining focusing on coal to oil and production of Urea and LNG. Coal to oil (from brown coal)appears to be the worlds only immediate proven solution to the current energy crisis and Australia has the cheapest, accessible security safe available resource. Well written but US centric.
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