I enjoy reading people I expect to disagree with, and I have a lot of time for the ones who were doing the work for years before I was born. Richard Lyon trained as an electrical engineer, flew for the Royal Air Force, took a second degree in petroleum engineering and then spent more than two decades in oil and gas — the UK, Norway, Azerbaijan, Congo, Cameroon — before adding a master's in energy economics. That is a career spent keeping the energy actually flowing, which is not the same thing as having opinions about it, and it earns a hearing.
It also earns a second point in his favour before we start. Lyon built Edinburgh's first certified passive house. People who haven't done that probably shouldn't throw stones at someone who has.
So: I skim-read The Energy Trap, concentrating on the parts most distinct from the usual arguments and most relevant to my own beat. Here is what I think holds, what doesn't, and the one idea in it I keep coming back to.
The density argument is a genuinely good reminder
It has been a long time since anyone made me sit with how remarkable fossilisation is as a process. It compresses and densifies energy, and — this is the part that gets overlooked — it does so into formats that are absurdly convenient. Coal and oil that store themselves. Oil and gas that will move through a pipe. And the near-miracle that a jet engine can carry enough fuel to lift its own fuel off the ground, and gets lighter as it flies.
Lyon is very good on why a battery cannot do that. An aircraft that has to take off carrying the full weight of its energy, and land still carrying it, is a genuinely hard engineering problem, and the energy density gap is the reason.
It is much less relevant to an EV, and barely relevant at all in a home. A car does not need to lift its battery into the sky, and a house does not need to move at all. The density argument is powerful exactly where weight is the binding constraint, and it quietly loses force everywhere else — which is most of the energy system.
Where the land argument runs out
The same goes for land. Gas and nuclear are very efficient users of land, and in a country as densely populated as Britain that is a real advantage, honestly stated.
But the comparison is narrower than the book makes it look. Wind farms mostly sit on hilly ground that was never going to be used for anything more industrial. Solar can be retrofitted onto buildings that are already there, taking no new land at all (though the cost per kw does skyrocket and many of the pupported benefits of behind the meter installations are, in reality just from avoiding grid charges and levies). Both coexist with agriculture — the sheep are still there, under the panels and between the turbines. Neither creates radiation risk, air pollution or a hazard to the people and wildlife nearby.
And the two dense options carry costs the land figure doesn't capture. A gas plant burns a finite resource, which is the book's own central complaint about everything else. A nuclear plant starts a pipeline of waste that has to be stored somewhere, by someone, for a very long time, which no one has properly worked out a solution to. Counting the footprint of the building while ignoring what the building consumes and emits is not the full accounting the rest of the book demands.
The best idea in the book is about oil rents
The observation I keep returning to has nothing to do with renewables.
Lyon draws a distinction between peak oil output and peak oil rents, and it is a sharp one. There is enormous heterogeneity in production cost — Saudi barrels at one end, Canadian oil sands at the other. It is a crude reminder, in both senses, that Saudi wealth and Saudi pricing power rest on the continued existence of the marginal, expensive fields. The premium only exists because someone else is producing at the top of the cost curve.
You can draw an interesting parallel with gas-fired generation, which is well into a decline where there are few remaining inframarginal rents for the more efficient plant to capture in the traditional merit order. The difference is that electricity, being a more nationalised and less internationally traded market, has options — central dispatch among them — that simply aren't available in oil.
That is a better frame than most of what is written about either market, and it isn't Lyon's headline argument. It's buried in a book about something else.
Clear on hydrogen, less sure-footed on money
The hydrogen chapter is clear and correct, both on the round-trip efficiency losses and on the awkward fact that hydrogen is less energy-dense by volume than the gas it is meant to replace. I have no argument with it.
The financial sections are where I was least persuaded. I'm not sure the argument has as much to do with macro-economic questions like MMT (which I’m very sceptical of, even as moderate Keynesian) as the book suggests — the case that money is a claim on energy seems to me to stand on its own, without needing that particular target. I'd also gently push back on the suggestion that anyone who advocates financing renewables is thereby an advocate for the whole project; people finance plenty of things they hold mixed views about. The passages on the growth of debt finance read similarly.
But I learnt two things there that I hadn't known, and both are good. The first is the linkage between post-2008 crisis interest rates and the nascent US shale boom — cheap capital as the enabling condition for an expensive, fast-declining resource. I had never had that connection drawn for me. The second is that some US shale basins have already peaked. That was genuinely news.
Questions I was left with
The North Sea. Lyon argues it declined faster than geology required, because of policy choice. As a non-geologist, I take from this that there are pressing and genuinely binary decisions about the last remaining reserves — that in some circumstances, not extracting now might foreclose the option entirely, or make it much harder later. I would very much like to understand whether, and when, that is true. It puts a different framing on the instinct I have always had about fossil fuels: that if we can leave them in the ground as a reserve for our children, in case they really need them, we should. If the option decays when unexercised, that instinct is wrong, and I'd want to know.
Flexibility is treated as one thing. It isn't. Heat and transport are far more flexible than genuinely critical demand. Even inside the tech and AI load that everyone is now worrying about, some demands flex easily and others don't at all. A system argument that treats demand as a single inflexible block is missing most of the interesting part.
Multi-year wind deficits. Real, and worth taking seriously. But solar and hydrogen imports probably mitigate them — and it's worth remembering that oil and gas run their own two-to-three-year price cycles. The exposure is different in kind, not obviously worse.
Worth reading
I disagree with the book's conclusion. I think it is better on physics than on policy, and I think the land argument, which does a lot of the structural work, doesn't survive contact with how Britain actually deploys wind and solar.
But it is short, it is clear, it is properly referenced, and it is written by someone who has spent a career on the supply side of the system rather than commenting on it. The peak-rents observation alone was worth the time. Read it and argue with it — that's the useful way to use it.
The Energy Trap: Why the renewable energy transition can't work – and what can, by Richard Lyon, is published by Forum / Swift Press on 24 September 2026. Available on Amazon.