Winning the Oil Endgame: Innovation for Profits, Jobs, and Security

by Amory Lovins et al., with forewords by George P. Shultz and Sir Mark Moody-Stuart. The Rocky Mountain Institute, Snowmass, Colorado, 2004; 328 pages, softcover, $40. Available for sale or free download from RMI ( www.rmi.org or www.oilendgame.org).

Winning the Oil Endgame is classic Amory Lovins and Rocky Mountain Institute. This highly detailed tome, complete with 987 footnotes and 20 pages of references, presents a clear and reasoned case for how American industry can restore competitiveness and boost profits by mobilizing modern technologies and smart business strategies to displace oil more cheaply than buying it. Lovins and his team of researchers argue that the U.S. can cut its oil use in half through efficiency improvements, then replace the other half with cheaper alternatives such as saved natural gas (by improving the efficiency with which we use that energy source) and biofuels. They present a timeline that has us saving more oil than we currently get from the Persian Gulf by 2015, cutting our oil use to 1970 levels by 2025, eliminating all oil imports by 2040, and ending our use of oil by 2050.

Remarkably—but not surprising to those who have followed Lovins’s arguments over the years—the book suggests that all this can be done without new taxation or federal regulation, and that going down this path will result in a net savings of $70 billion per year by 2025. “Our energy future is choice, not fate,” the book argues. “Oil dependence is a problem we need no longer have—and it’s cheaper not to. U.S. oil dependence can be eliminated by proven and attractive technologies that create wealth, enhance choice, and strengthen common security. This could be achieved only as far in the future as the 1973 oil embargo is in the past.”

The forewords by the past Secretary of State George Shultz (a Republican) and the past chairman of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, lend the report an air of credibility not often found with alternative-energy-future books. This is an important book that will likely get very serious attention over the next few years—particularly if oil prices (currently surpassing $55 per barrel) continue their upward trend.

– AW