Drilling Down: Tainter and Patzek tell the energy-complexity story
Joseph Tainter and Tadeusz Patzek are authors of a soon-to-be-released book called Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle and Our Energy Dilemma.
Tainter and Patzek use the story of Gulf oil spill as the background for discussing the energy-complexity spiral.
The book has nine chapters:
1. Introduction
2. The Significance of Oil in the Gulf of Mexico
3. The Energy that Runs the World
4. Offshore Drilling and Production: A Short History
5. The Energy Complexity Spiral
6. The Benefits and Costs of Complexity
7. What Happened at the Macondo Well
8. Why the Gulf Disaster Happened
9. Our Energy and Complexity Dilemma: Prospects for the Future
We have already extracted quite a bit of the easy-to-extract oil. As we move on to more difficult to extract oil we find it necessary to use ever more complex costly and risky technologies driven by falling EROEI in an energy-complexity spiral. The energy-complexity spiral in oil production mirrors the larger energy complexity spiral in society as a whole. [url=http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8429?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+theoildrum+(The+Oil+Drum)]Read more[/url]