Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil (Norton Paperback) Illustrated Edition

This book is a short read, so the review should be short, too. This is the best book on fuel depletion on the market, in my opinion: short, accurate, factual, non-polarizing, objective, useful, and scientifically correct. Reviewers who quibble over small stuff are missing the point. There is an annotated bibliography for those who want more. You can't go wrong with this one.

First, the bad news. Most of this book is off-topic. Only a small fraction of the book deals with peak oil or running out of gas. The remainder deals with topics like physics, energy, history of industrialism, and more--topics which are only tangentially related to peak oil.With that said, the book contains an excellent non-technical introduction to fundamental concepts of physics and energy. It describes things like entropy, thermodynamics, and so on, in a manner which is lucid, approachable, and highly interesting. This book would make an excellent introduction to energy and thermodynamics for high school students, or for older adults whose scientific education was less than satisfactory.The book also contains a readable and concise overview of the history of the industrial revolution. It deals with things like the Steam Engine and improvements to it, internal combustion engines, and so on. This book nicely intertwines the development of steam engines with the simultaneous development of theories of energy and physics.Overall, this book is a good read, even if it's meandering and occasionally off-topic.

Great book, thanks!! Love the topic and the facts --very powerful topic! The US better get dependence on something other than oil!

"Out of Gas" is a book that anyone concerned with survival should read. One must not expect technology to fix the shortage of fossil fuels. We must mend our ways, and this book explains why.

Gives a good picture of the depletion of oil with a simplistic background on thermodynamics. I had a few quibbles with some of the information on different energy sources (this was published 8 years ago now!), but overall this provides a quick read for scope on a very important topic.

It was exactly as described.

Still true, even after fracking and tar sands. The hydrocarbons may still be there; but the climate damage is too great if we chose to burn them.

good

I read this after seeing David Goodstein give an interview on the DVD 'A Crude Awakening'.It is good to see a Professor at Cal Tech add his warning of an unprecedented situation arising when the supply of all starts falling.This could happen any day now because we have reached a plateau in global oil production and supplies are getting more difficult and expensive to find.