According to the conventional wisdom we live in a post-industrial information age. This book
however paints a different picture: We live in the age of oil. Petroleum fuels and feedstocks
are responsible for much of what we take for granted in modern society from chemical products
such as fertilizer and plastics to the energy that moves people and goods in a global economy.
Oil is a nearly perfect fuel: Energy dense safe to store easy to transport and mostly
environmentally benign. Most importantly oil has been cheap and abundant during the past 150
years. In 1998 two respected geologists Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrère published a
detailed article announcing that the end of cheap oil would happen before 2010 which meant
that the world would face a peak or at least a plateau in global daily oil production in the
first decade of the new millennium. Today two billion people under the age of 14 have lived
the majority of their lives past the point when this century-long growth in oil supplies came
to an end which also marks the end of the first half of the age of oil. This transition has
ushered in a new reality of high oil prices stagnating oil supplies and sluggish economies.
In this book a leading authority on energy explores the contributions and continuing legacy of
Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrère the two geologists who modified the terms of the debate
about oil. The book provides a unique perspective and state-of-the-art overview of today's
energy reality and its enormous economic and social implications.- Covers a topic that eclipses
climate change as the most important but least understood challenge for contemporary society-
Explores the works of Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrère the leading authorities in the field
of Peak Oil authors of The End of Cheap Oil (Scientific American 1998) and founding members
of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas- Addresses a broad audience of scientists
engineers and economists in a format that is accessible to the general public- Provides a
complete overview of the basic geological chemical physical economic and historical concepts
that every oil consumer should understand- Presents the latest information on oil production
reserves discoveries prices and fields in easy-to-understand graphs and plots
