Deffeyes: Not really the Stone Age

Fifty years ago today, on the morning of March 8, 1956, M. King Hubbert gave a talk in San Antonio in which he predicted that US oil production would start to decline by the early 1970s. Up until minutes before Hubbert began, executives at the head office of Shell Oil (his employer) were on the phone asking him to cancel the talk. Hubbert’s presentation is widely regarded as the opening of the great debate about the finiteness of our oil supply. The original letter inviting Hubbert to give the talk has been posted at www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/API_Strang.pdf.

Hubbert enlisted two senior petroleum geologists (Wallace Pratt and Lewis Weeks) to provide opinions about the total amount of oil that would eventually be produced from the US. The more optimistic opinion, 200 billion barrels, gave a production peak in the early 1970s. The lower estimate, 150 billion barrels, would have yielded a peak in the early 1960s. Most of us give Hubbert the benefit of the doubt and cite the early 1970s peak; the actual year of peak US production was 1970. The 150 billion barrel estimate, however, was a better fit to the data available in 1956.

By 1967, the US exploration and production history was far enough along for Hubbert to dispense with the expert opinions and estimate the size of the resource from the discovery and production data alone. Surprisingly, to this day some critics claim that all Hubbertian estimates require an advance guess at the total oil resource.

It was not until 1982 that Hubbert published a long paper explaining the math behind his analyses. It is typical of Hubbert that we do not know how much of the math he utilized at the beginning and how much he worked up later to justify his earlier efforts.

Princeton