The Energy Trap: Why the Renewable Energy Transition Can’t Work – and What Can by Richard Lyon (Swift Press, 2026)
Richard Lyon’s The Energy Trap is a short book with large ambitions: to strip the energy debate back to first principles and make the key policy issues accessible to the intelligent reader. He describes it as “a friendly guide that gives you the minimum set of facts you need, with references so you can check the claims yourself. … You’re perfectly capable of understanding what’s happening if someone takes the trouble to explain it clearly.” The result, as he says in his prologue, can be read in “three cups of tea and half a packet of biscuits”.
The author combines training in electrical engineering, petroleum engineering and energy economics with more than 25 years in senior upstream oil and gas roles in the UK, Norway, Azerbaijan, Congo and Cameroon. Having spent much of my own career in the industry at the downstream end, in corporate planning where the outlook for demand, supply and prices is the bread and butter of the analyst, I read the book with great interest. What insights could an upstream engineer and energy economist who worked on resource assessment, field development and extraction decisions – working at the ‘coal face’ of the supply side, so to speak – bring to corporate planning?
Physics, depletion and escaping the energy trap
The book argues its case in three broad strands, spread across seven short parts in 110 pages of main text. First
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It’s difficult for a non-economist to adjudicate against two economists (Doshi full time, Lyon part time). Doshi’s case that the return on capital invested counts more than the return on energy invested sounds dubious, especially when the spend is controlled by ideologically-driven governments which made the misguided decision decades ago to bet the farm on low ERoEI so-called renewables (wind and solar) which are ruinously-expensive when costed on an overall system and life-cycle basis and which can’t be built or replaced without the heavy-lifting capabilities (in mining, mineral processing, steel and concrete production, shipping, …) of the very hydrocarbons they are supposed to replace.
On peak oil, Doshi says “The relevant question is not how much oil lies underground, but what human ingenuity can discover, develop and substitute, given prices and institutions”. The risks involved in this precarious situation need to be aired more publicly. Richard Lyon’s book has brought to light that there has been little to no public debate on this potentially society-upending issue, at a time when the energy policies being inflicted on us by our Uniparty politicians are so irrational that we can’t believe a word of what they say.
I have just started the section on depletion and I agree with all this review says about it.
I think it is unhelpful for such a book to propose a new basis for monetary policy.
In a world where it pays to have small populations and big energy, Britain has opted for big populations and small energy. As an example of strategic folly this is hard to beat.
The problem I see is that bureaucratic central planning is constantly edging forward and never seems to retreat. And the disruption and failings it produces are misattributed to “market failures” which inevitably brings about more regulations and central planning. And on and on.
Unless the population can recover faith in the free market system, somehow push back the central planners and force deregulation, I don’t see us getting out of this doom-loop.
You either believe in human ingenuity unleashed through free markets or you don’t. Established power and their bureaucrats don’t because they don’t like that which they cannot control.
When was the last time you heard of a commentator, politician or teacher extolling the advantages of free market capitalism and the price mechanism. Never in public.
At universities PPE seems to have little “E” and all of it is Marxist.
Isn’t the earths production of oil and gas an ongoing process? Each layer is making its way into becoming the next coal oil and gas on a continuous journey over time, it wasnt just created back then and then stopped!
Over the hundred years or so that humans have been using it in serious quantities i rather think the earth as a whole as created far more of it during that time than we could ever use!
I think some discussion of scale would be in order. Most people have not taken the time to understand the size of the planet. This relates to the discussion about oil and its availability, because although it may take the planet a certain number of years to produce a barrel of oil, what I have never had explained is just how many “barrels” the planet is filling every day.
I propose as a starter to the subject of scale a little fact which certainly helps me comprehend how insignificant humans are on this planet…:
Dig a hole just one mile wide, one mile across and one mile deep. You’d be able to fit all the humans in it, with plenty of room to spare.
This planet and its resources are utterly enormous. And the oil industry is quite happy to let people continue believing we are running out of oil. My prediction is that we’ll still be using oil in 200 years, and in greater quantities than today, and we’ll still be talking about it running out.
Lyons does not seem to live in the real world of oil and gas economics or he just did not learn much in his career with whomever he worked with