Energy in an insecure World. (Book Review).

Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

Peter Hoffmann, Tomorrow's Energy: Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, and the Prospects for a Cleaner Planet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

The events of fall 2001 revived a dormant debate in the United States over energy security and the tangled web the nation weaves between oil consumption and foreign policy. Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid's book Taliban, boosted to bestseller status, detailed the U.S. government's initial support of the radical Taliban movement as a means to accessing the alluring oil and gas reserves of Central Asia. Pre-attack interviews with Osama bin Laden suggested that the oil-related U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia after the Persian Gulf War had in no small measure motivated his holy war on America. Editorials in Business Week, The Economist, and the New York Times expressed anger that addiction to Saudi oil was muffling U.S. criticism of the royal family's repressive regime. Most of this commentary assumed that the underlying problem was dependence on oil imports from politically unstable regions. Less attention was devoted to the question of whether petroleum itself had become a blessing-turned-curse for th e early twenty-first century's sole superpower.

Against this backdrop, Kenneth Deffeyes's book Hubbert's Peak has unintended but excellent timing. Nature-writing readers may remember Deffeyes as John McPhee's colorful guide and mentor in Annals of the Former World, McPhee's masteful ode to North American geological history. Today a professor emeritus at Princeton University, Deffeyes proves as entertaining an author as he was a subject, cutting to the chase in the opening paragraph: "Global oil production will probably reach a peak sometime during this decade. After the peak, the world's production of crude oil will fall, never to rise again.... The slowdown in oil production may already be beginning; the current price fluctuations for crude oil and natural gas may be the preamble to a major crisis."

The title of Deffeyes's book, and the intellectual underpinning of his argument, refers to M. King Hubbert, the geologist who in 1956 predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s. Hubbert's prediction was roundly rejected, both within and without the oil industry. But in 1970, U.S. oil production began to fall--validating the geologist and the dimple-like curve that underlay his analysis--now commonly known as "Hubbert's Pimple" or "Hubbert's Peak."

In the mid-1990s, a number of analysts began to apply Hubbert's methodology to world oil production. Most of them have concluded that the peak will be between 2004 and 2008, and their studies have been published in such prestigious outlets as Nature, Science, and Scientific American. But despite the enormous implications for the world economy should this come to pass, political leaders have paid scant attention.

There are several reasons why the latest warnings have been ignored like Hubbert's. The oil business is extremely profitable today: who wants to believe the bad news? Also, the 20th century witnessed many false prophets, predicting that the oil industry would dry up within 10 years. Hubbert was placed in this camp, until it turned out that, as one supporter put it, "this time the wolf really is at the door."

Using Hubbert's technique himself, Deffeyes believes that the peak in world oil production will occur before 2004 (see figure). He hopes to be proven wrong; but even if he is, it would take a large effort to restrain world oil consumption to postpone that peak to 2010. "My message would remain much the same: crude oil is much too valuable to be burned as a fuel." That is a remarkable statement from someone who was born and grew up in the middle of the Oklahoma City oil field, and who spent many years working at Houston's Shell Oil research laboratory--with Hubbert as a colleague.

One of the most promising long-term substitutes for petroleum--and for the suite of fossil fuels--is hydrogen, the lightest and most abundant element in the universe. Interest in hydrogen as an "energy carrier"--a medium that takes energy from where it is produced to where it is consumed--can be traced back to the nineteenth-century musings of Cambridge University clergy and dons, and of science fiction writer Jules Verne. Attention to hydrogen during the twentieth century more or less rose and fell as the world alternated between war and peace, and high and low oil prices. But as Peter Hoffmann writes in Tomorrow's Energy, hydrogen and its companion technology, the fuel cell--also conceived in the nineteenth century--are nearing commercialization in many applications, setting them up as likely successors to the internal combustion engine, power plants, and batteries in laptop computers and cell phones.

Hoffmann, the editor and publisher of the industry journal Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Letter, has been on the hydrogen beat for more than two decades, and accordingly has an unsurpassed wealth of personal experience and contacts on which to draw. Fortunately, enough has happened in the field since his 1981 book on the subject, The Forever Fuel, to make his latest contribution much more than a revised edition. At the same time, he has been around long enough to avoid the just-around-the-corner breathlessness that often accompanies alternative energy coverage.

Several factors explain how the "Why hydrogen?" argument has become more compelling since the 1980s. Fuel cell technology, for years limited to spaceship applications, has improved dramatically. Major automakers now collectively invest billions in fuel cells each year, and plan to put their first commercial vehicles on the road in the next few years. Shell, BP, and other energy titans have created hydrogen technology-related business ventures. Renewable energy, perhaps hydrogen's long-run source of production, has matured and begun to enter the mainstream market. More politicians are willing to push hydrogen--U.S. Senator Tom Harkin provides a foreword to Hoffmann's book. Finally, environmental concerns--notably urban air pollution and climate change--have emerged and added to the impetus toward hydrogen.

But Hoffinann is not one to shy away from the devilish details, noting the challenges that lie ahead, principally the need for continued improvements in the economics of all facets of a hydrogen energy system--from production to delivery to storage to use--before it can fully displace its hydrocarbon-based predecessor. And with respect to the looming environmental challenges, "in the grand scheme of things all the recent progress seems piddling and feeble when measured against what is needed." Like the euphemistic description of someone who "continues to have great potential," hydrogen may--without added efforts from government and industry--continue to be "tomorrow's s energy" for decades to come.

Seth Dunn is a research associate at the Worldwatch Institute and author of Worldwatch Paper 157, Hydrogen Futures: Toward a Sustainable Energy System, and co-author of "Moving the Climate Change Agenda Forward," in State of the World 2002 (W.W. Norton & Company, 2002).

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