The Battle for Barrels: Peak Oil Myths & World Oil Futures (ISBN 1846680123)

Waste of time and money:
This is my second attempt at reviewing this piece of garbage. The first one got magically taken away. Anyways, I'll be somewhat brief. The book stinks. It is a 10 page paper masquerading as a full-length book. This of course makes sense because the average person would feel cheated if they paid $20 for a 10 page paper. The author immediately starts into explaining generalities of the oil industry's current state and just repeats them over and over. No real intro into how the oil exploration industry works. In fact, you get almost no background at all. But you do get acronyms. Ohhhh.....the acronyms. ASPO. ODAC. IEA. EIA. MBOPD. CERA-IHS. MMBOPB. API. CTL. LNG. GDP. BOE. UNIDO. And that's just chapter 3. Really this is just a pointless book. I somewhat agree with the overall philosophy. I'm in the "yeah, we're running out of oil, but it's not all going to disappear in a single day so chill out" camp, but this book is a waste.

Save your money--it's not worth it.:
The message of this book would have made a great editorial, but it doesn't make a great book. The language is stilted, it rambles on and on, is repetitious and uses words such as "lacustrine" and foreign language phrases that are meaningless to probably most readers. To save you time and the price of the book, the gist of the book is this: The Peak Oil proponents are like those who predict the end of the world on a certain date, then, when that doesn't happen, chose another future date. They also ignore the possiblity of future oil finds. On the other hand, the author makes what appears to be a valid and reasoned argument that nobody has a clue as to how much oil there really is on earth, as exploration to find new basins/reservoirs is expensive, takes years, and is high risk (due to terrorism, politcs, etc.) For the reader interested in a view at the extreme opposite of the Peak Oil theory, in his book "The Deep Hot Biosphere," Thomas Gold gives arguments and evidence that we'll never run out of oil because it is continually being synthesized far beneath the surface of the earth by the extreme pressures and temperatures there.

a typical right wing approach to a predictable and avoidable crisis:
Said crisis has already arrived, we just have not felt its true effects yet, the cause being that oil is a non-renewable resource. The author, as stated in another review, believes that the free market will rise up with a solution once the price of oil reaches epidemic high proportions, and in true American fashion, we will rise to the emergency and deal with it. This is typical right wing thinking, leading us to a dead end and bankrupting our middle class before we have a chance to find an alternative.

A rational, reasoned approach to the 'peak oil' issue:
This book makes a good case against fears of an imminent decline in global oil output ('peak oil'). Clarke presents a view based on long and deep experience of the petroleum industry, and his book therefore serves as a counterbalance to many ill-informed proponents of 'peak oil'. He points out the complex interplay of geology, economics, technology and politics in the modern oil world, and the many corporate and state players, which make it impossible to reduce the world oil future to a few simple parameters. There are few, if any, books making this case, which gives this text particular importance.