The Oil Drum

I don't see why this is an "us vs. them" issue. The point he is making is valid and important. People run many processes where the output energy is less than the input energy. The idea that energy production will stop when EROEI<1 is ridiculous. That would only be true in a world where there is just one type of energy.

Here's another example: the shift from hunting/gathering to agriculture. That was a step down in EROEI. You have to put in a lot more energy to get a calorie from farming than from hunting. Nevertheless, the shift to a lower EROEI food (energy) source led to a massive increase in food availability. A lower EROEI source can be better than a high EROEI source if the lower EROEI source is more plentiful and reliable.

Stuart Staniford writes:

"It's progress that they are ridiculing us. That's one stage past ignoring us, right?"

Spot on.

I've actually read `The Bottomless Well" from cover to cover - and there's no mention of Hubbert in it whatsoever, no mention of Campbell, Laherrere, Deffeyes, Simmons or any of the big names of the `peak oil' community - although the book was published in late 2004. The sacrilegious term peak oil isn't used at all. Needless to say there is no mention either of Malthus, Hardin, Catton, Georgescu-Roegen or Daly - all apparently on the index librorum prohibitorum. The only treatment intellectual adversaries get in the book is what one might call `dynamic silence'. And the only section in TBW that addresses oil depletion at all is Chapter 11 on `Infinite Supply' - in a couple of paragraphs and one footnote (page 181). But as Stuart points out, al least the silent treatment of Huber 2004 has since been replaced by mockery, derision and calumniation of Huber 2005.

This is what Huber had to say in TBW on how technology will save us:

"[T]he day is not far off when 6-inch diameter pulsed beams produced by advanced high-power lasers will replace rotary mechanical drills. Bundles of optical fiber will channel the energy down the 5-mile borehole, with lenses at the end to focus the laser light on the rock face. The intense heat will melt the rock, extend the borehole, and then sheath it in colid ceramic, eliminating the need for a steel casing. The power of the photon will pursue and retrieve fuel created a hundred million years ago by the power of the sun. [...] The logic of fuel-retrieving machines has advanced much faster than the fuels have retreated - we keep getting closer to the receding horizon. [...] Energy supplies are - for all practical purposes - infinite.*"

Cornucopian, futuristic, exuberant fantasies about salvation through laser?  Sounds like a fairy tale to me.  

To the above paragraphs Huber adds the following footnote:

" *In May 2004, with $40 dollar-per-barrel oil generating daily headlines, Science published a piece arguing that periodic panics about imminent exhaustion are almost as old as oil production itself, and are invariably followed by new bonanzas of production. "The world is not running out of oil"; there will be "abundant supplies for years to come." Leonardo Maugeri, "Oil, Never Cry Wolf - Why the Petroleum Age is Far from Over," Science 304, no 5674 (21 May 2004): 1114-1115."

And basically that's all a book about the `bottomless well' has to say about the `bottomless well'. Actually apart from that the book contains a lot of fascinating tidbits on laser technology, fuel cells and the environmental impact of fuel consumption. It's just that it doesn't really address the subject-matter of its full title: `The Bottomless Well - The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We will Never Run out of Energy."