Beyond Oil
I highly recommend Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert’s Peak to anyone who’s interested in the near future of energy consumption (which really should be everyone in the developed world). Deffeyes is a petroleum geologist who has come to believe that we will likely hit the peak of global petroleum production sometime this year, if we haven’t already. (He’s using the methodology that his Shell co-worker M. King Hubbert used in the late 1950s to successfully predict the U.S. production peak in the early 70s.)
As the title suggests, the book is mostly concerned with what our other energy options are as crude oil becomes more scarce. As a geologist, he wisely sticks to his area of expertise, covering natural gas, coal, tar sands, oil shale, uranium, and hydrogen–he doesn’t spend much time discussing solar, wind, or tidal energy. Clearly an experienced lecturer, Deffeyes spices up the dry science with digressions, like an anecdote about how he got access to good uranium mining records by plying the night computer staff with pastries and soda.
After enumerating the problems with most of the alternatives (for instance, tar sands have high capital costs and require expensive hydrogen to convert into more usable lighter crude), Deffeyes concludes that our most promising prospects for the near future lie with coal and uranium. Though they both have significant environmental costs, they’re both proven fuels that we have in plentiful supply.