The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy

If you read through the customer reviews of this book, there are 4 types of review. Some seem likely to be helpful in making a purchasing decision. Others, not so much. A potential buyer would be wise to discount or ignore unhelpful reviews and count only the others.1) Reviewers, like me, who found the book fascinating, well-written, informative; who admire Huber and Mills for taking on “common wisdom” like David slinging a stone at Goliath; who continually find ourselves paging back to check out an interesting factoid or re-read a particularly sweet gem of a logical argument. We all give the book 5 stars. Since you won’t know if you love it as much as we do until you actually read it, unless one of us is your friend and you are prepared to just take our word for it that the book is eminently read-worthy, our reviews probably aren’t all that helpful.2) Reviewers who never even attempted to understand (or, perhaps, read) the book, but gave it a low rating (usually 1 star). These reviews are generally characterized by diatribes against evil oil profiteers. Had these reviewers flipped the pages at all, they might have realized that this book has pretty much nothing to say about oil specifically. Hint: oil is _not_ mentioned in the title! Also look out for references to “Intelligent Design” (which we can all see, for free on Amazon, does not show up at all in the book’s index). These reviewers also frequently rely on the “experts” defense, as in “So-and-so said we’re all going to run out of energy and die so this book is wrong.” Verdict: since they didn’t read it, why listen to them? Unhelpful.3) Reviewers who read the book, thought about it, and obviously still didn’t get it at even the most basic scientific level. These reviews are generally characterized by claims that are not in keeping with basic high school-level thermodynamics. Incidentally, much of Bottomless Well is basically a layman’s grounding in basic high school-level thermodynamics. These folks tend to give 1 star, much like a completely colorblind person looking at a Van Gogh might say “what’s the big deal?”. Verdict: since they need to go back to intro physics class, why listen to them? Unhelpful.3) Reviewers who read the book, thought about it, examined the facts, and disagreed with the conclusions. They tend to give somewhere between 3 or 5 stars. THESE ARE THE REVIEWS TO CONSIDER. These are basically the “lethargists” that Huber and Mills mention – that is, folks who want to reduce overall human consumption of (ordered) energy. Generally there are two potential reasons why these folks identify as “lethargists”. But for both of them, “Repent, the end is near” would be a good motto.Of these reviewers, one group says, “I’ve read all of Huber and Mills’ evidence that we’re not in any danger of running out of energy sources anytime soon – and I still don’t believe it.”The other group says, “It doesn’t matter that you _can_ drive a nuclear-powered automobile – you shouldn’t. “Basically, all these folks are right. You can’t fight entropy forever. And fighting entropy in one place has to create a corresponding entropic effect someplace else. However, it is of course the timing of all this that is key. Presumably the first group believes that, even though everyone in the past who has ever said we were in imminent danger of running out of useable energy was wrong, they are correct this time.As for the second group, one is tempted to ask – just whose consumption of (ordered) energy are you planning to curtail? It’s very easy to curtail the use of (ordered) energy by little brown people on the other side of the world, and quite another to turn off the heat in Mom’s house and let her freeze to death. Or, say, give up using the computer on which you typed your nifty little book review.It’s difficult to determine why this third type of reviewer (both groups) doesn’t give the book 5 stars. Most of them seem to have derived quite a lot of benefit from reading the book – it gave them a foil against which to argue their own, competing opinions. Very few of these reviewers seem to have had a problem with the writing style, or the layout, or the logical argument of the book. In fact they seem to have, basically, enjoyed it (in the same way that we can “enjoy” a horror movie). But they give less than 5 stars because they disagree with the authors’ conclusions. The fact that you disagreed with the conclusions seems like a rather unfair basis on which to dock points – I didn’t particularly want Luke to get his hand cut off by Vader, but that doesn’t make it a bad movie. Thus, these group 3 reviews should in fairness probably be weighted towards “5 stars”.That’s it, buy the book.

Although a few quantitative details are not now correct, they were reasonable at the time of writing. Some of the predictions haven't come to pass. The most important thing was the application of system analysis. Climate activists and doomsayers focus on components and essentially never consider more of the system than necessary to make their claims. As Stephen Schneider said "we have to make little mention of any doubts." Huber and Mills connect far more corners of the big picture.And their style is entertaining and engaging. Not just dry science and data.

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.

The title theme of the book is mostly secondary. Largely the author made the point that our history has been one of steadily increased energy use, and our future will be same. Much of that energy will be use to refine energy itself into more useful and discrete forms, be in conditioning electricity or packaging it into things like batteries. Then there's the increased energy use in fabricating increasingly sophisticated machines and devices to use that refined energy. Energy efficiencies won't reduce our energy consumption, they enable us to use more, and as we deplete some fossil fuel resources, we'll make increasingly advanced ways to find more, all at changed or even lower prices. De-carbonization and carbon neutral advocates will hate this book, it being clear to that author that those efforts are futile and contrary to the advance of our civilisation.. Lucid and well written – I didn't put it down until I was finished.

Bad smell

In diesem Buch finden sich viele erfrischend andere Denkansätze zu einem Thema, das in den Medien von Neumalthusianern beherrscht wird.

Fascinating analysis of energy, power and fuel sources. Deserves to be much more widely discussed.