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Drilling Down de Joseph A. Tainter

Drilling Down

Autor Joseph A. Tainter, Tadeusz W. Patzek
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 16 sep 2011

Recomandăm Drilling Down ca o resursă esențială pentru studenții și profesioniștii din managementul resurselor naturale și politici energetice, fiind o analiză care depășește simpla cronică a unui accident industrial. Lucrarea semnată de Joseph A. Tainter și Tadeusz W. Patzek investighează dezastrul petrolier din Golful Mexicului nu doar ca o eroare tehnică, ci ca un rezultat inevitabil al dependenței noastre de sisteme din ce în ce mai complexe, susținute de energie ieftină. Ne-a atras atenția modul în care autorii structurează argumentația: primele capitole stabilesc importanța petrolului și istoricul forajului offshore, pentru ca nucleul cărții (capitolele 5 și 6) să dezvolte conceptul de „spirală energie-complexitate”. Această abordare teoretică explică de ce, pe măsură ce resursele ușor de extras dispar, suntem forțați să apelăm la tehnologii tot mai sofisticate și riscante. Analiza tehnică a incidentului de la puțul Macondo este completată de anexe valoroase care descriu operarea unei platforme offshore, oferind rigoarea necesară pentru un curriculum academic. În contextul operei sale, Drilling Down reprezintă o aplicare practică a tezelor din The Collapse of Complex Societies. Dacă în lucrările anterioare Joseph A. Tainter analiza prăbușirea civilizațiilor antice, aici demonstrează cum aceleași mecanisme de diminuare a randamentului investițiilor în complexitate ne afectează prezentul industrial. Cartea este o alternativă solidă la Black Beaches and Bayous pentru cursurile de sociologie a mediului sau managementul riscului, având avantajul unei fundamentări teoretice interdisciplinare care îmbină termodinamica cu istoria socială.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9781441976765
ISBN-10: 1441976760
Pagini: 252
Ilustrații: IX, 242 p. 97 illus., 47 illus. in color.
Dimensiuni: 155 x 235 x 14 mm
Greutate: 0.39 kg
Ediția:2012
Editura: Springer
Locul publicării:New York, NY, United States

Public țintă

Popular/general

De ce să citești această carte

Această lucrare este indispensabilă celor care doresc să înțeleagă mecanismele profunde din spatele crizelor energetice moderne. Cititorul câștigă o perspectivă sistemică asupra riscurilor tehnologice, învățând că dezastrele ecologice sunt adesea simptome ale unei societăți care își forțează limitele de complexitate. Este o lectură fundamentală pentru viitorii decidenți în politici publice și inginerie, oferind un cadru critic pentru evaluarea viitorului post-petrol.

Despre autor

Joseph A. Tainter este un antropolog și istoric american de renume, faimos pentru cercetările sale asupra sustenabilității și prăbușirii sistemelor sociale, fiind autorul lucrării de referință The Collapse of Complex Societies. Expertiza sa în evoluția complexității este completată în acest volum de Tadeusz W. Patzek, specialist în ingineria petrolieră. Împreună, cei doi autori reușesc să pună în dialog științele sociale cu rigoarea tehnică a ingineriei, oferind o viziune holistică asupra modului în care resursele energetice modelează traiectoria civilizației umane.

Cuprins

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.- Appendix A.  Glossary
Appendix B.  Offshore Production.- Appendix C.  Operating an Offshore Platform.- Index.

Recenzii

From the reviews:
“Tainter and Patzek use the story of Gulf oil spill as the background for discussing the energy-complexity spiral, and its relationship to this accident. … Drilling Down touches on many interesting topics, from details about how extraction is done … to overviews of how various civilizations have dealt with rising complexity and reduced energy flows. … The book is well worth … . With one detail-oriented author, and one ‘big picture’ author, the book includes something for everyone.” (Gail Tverberg, Financial Sense, September, 2011)

Notă biografică

Joseph A. Tainter is Professor of Sustainability in the Department of Environment and Society, Utah State University, having previously served as Department Head. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Northwestern University in 1975. Dr. Tainter worked on issues of sustainability before the term became common, including his highly-acclaimed book The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1988). He is co-editor of The Way the Wind Blows: Climate, History, and Human Action (Columbia University Press, 2000), a work exploring past human responses to climate change. With T. F. H. Allen and Thomas Hoekstra he wrote Supply-Side Sustainability (Columbia University Press, 2003), the first comprehensive approach to sustainability to integrate ecological and social science. Dr. Tainter has taught at the University of New Mexico and Arizona State University. Until 2005 he directed the Cultural Heritage Research Project in Rocky Mountain Research Station. Dr. Tainter’s sustainability research has been used in more than 40 countries, and in many scientific and applied fields. Among other institutions, his work has been consulted in the United Nations Environment Programme, UNESCO, the World Bank, the Rand Corporation, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, the Earth Policy Institute, and the Technology Transfer Institute/Vanguard. Dr. Tainter has been invited to present his research at the Getty Research Center, the University of Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne), the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and many other venues. His research has been applied in numerous fields, including economic development, energy, environmental conservation, health care, information technology, urban studies, and the challenges of security in response to terrorism. He appears in the film The 11th Hour, produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, Leila Conners Petersen, Brian Gerber, and Chuck Castleberry, and in theABC News special Earth 2100. His biography has been included in Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in America, and Who’s Who in Science and Engineering. Dr. Tainter’s current research focuses on sustainability, energy, and innovation.
Tad Patzek is the Lois K. and Richard D. Folger Leadership Professor and Chairman of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Austin. He also holds the Cockrell Regents Chair #11. Between 1990 and 2008, he was a Professor of Geoengineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining Berkeley, he was a researcher at Shell Development, a unique research company managed for 20 years by M. King Hubbert of the Hubbert peaks. Patzek’s current research involves mathematical and numerical modeling of earth systems with emphasis on fluid flow in the subsurface soils and rocks. He works on the thermodynamics and ecology of human survival, especially on the global food and energy supply systems. More recently, Patzek has engaged in the studies of complex systems, focusing on the ultra deepwater offshore operations. He briefed Congress on the BP Deepwater Horizon well disaster in the Gulf, and was a frequent guest on NPR, ABC, BBC, CNN, and CBS programs. For the last two years, Patzek’s research has emphasized the use of unconventional natural gas as a fuel bridge to the possible new energy supply schemes for the U.S. He appeared in the Haynesville Shale documentary. Currently, Patzek teaches courses in petroleum engineering, hydrology, ecology and energy supply, computer science, and mathematical modeling of earth systems. Patzek is a coauthor of over 200 papers and reports, and is writing five books. In March 2011, he was chosen by US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to serve on the Ocean Energy Safety Advisory Committee, a permanent advisory body providing critical guidance on improving offshore drilling safety, well containment, and spill responseoffshore.

Textul de pe ultima copertă

For more than a century, oil has been the engine of growth for a society that delivers an unprecedented standard of living to many. We now take for granted that economic growth is good, necessary, and even inevitable, but also feel a sense of unease about the simultaneous growth of complexity in the processes and institutions that generate and manage that growth. As societies grow more complex through the bounty of cheap energy, they also confront problems that seem to increase in number and severity. In this era of fossil fuels, cheap energy and increasing complexity have been in a mutually-reinforcing spiral. The more energy we have and the more problems our societies confront, the more we grow complex and require still more energy. How did our demand for energy, our technological prowess, the resulting need for complex problem solving, and the end of easy oil conspire to make the Deepwater Horizon oil spill increasingly likely, if not inevitable? This book explains the real causal factors leading up to the worst environmental catastrophe in U.S. history, a disaster from which it will take decades to recover.
A world expert on oil technology and one of our foremost social commentators, the author of “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” join forces to:
  • Lead you on a fascinating tour from the events on the Deepwater Horizon to the processes in society that made the tragedy nearly inevitable
  • Explain the energy-complexity spiral that governs our way of life
  • Take you beyond the headlines, finger pointing, and political punditry to the underlying causes of the Gulf catastrophe
  • Help decision-makers from all walks of life to understand the risks and challenges of managing complex organizations
  • Discuss energy options for the future
Praise for Drilling Down:
In this book, Joseph Tainter and Tadeusz Patzek use the Gulf oil spill as a point of entry to discussour energy future. For those of us who watched the oil spill from afar, this book provides the technical background to help us understand it, something that was never available from the media. For those like me, who are interested in the role of energy in the rise and fall of civilizations, this is a must read.
--Lester R. Brown, President of Earth Policy Institute and author of World on the Edge