GEOLOGY
The Oracle of Oil
Predicting peak oil
A new biography probes M. King Hubbert’s
controversial mid-century energy pronouncement
By Charles Hall
“W
e have no choice but to proceed
into a future which we may be
assured will difer markedly
from anything we have experi-
enced thus far. Among the in-
evitable characteristics of this
future will be the progressive exhaustion of
the mineral fuels” (1). These words sound
very much like what you might hear in vari-
ous quarters today, but they were written in
1949 by the American geophysicist Marion
King Hubbert.
Hubbert is best known for developing the
theory of “peak oil”: the idea that oil pro-
duction will be characterized by an initial
period of exponential growth, followed by
a peak (or peaks), followed by
a substantial decline. Debates
about Hubbert’s predictions
were intense in his lifetime and
continue today.
I once heard Hubbert intro-
duced at a lecture in this way:
“In an age of publish or perish,
he has published only nine pa-
pers. Each of them is in a dif-
ferent field. And each of them is
considered a classic.” The Oracle
of Oil is a masterful telling of
Hubbert’s life and ideas, writ-
ten by journalist Mason Inman,
a knowledgeable and graceful
storyteller.
Hubbert grew up on a hard-
scrabble farm in Texas at the
turn of the 20th century. At the
age of 17, he sold his cow for train fare and
set of to Weatherford Community College,
where he worked odd jobs to aford the
tuition. With the encouragement of, and a
loan from, Weatherford’s president, he went
on to study geology at the University of Chi-
cago. He had intended to study chemistry,
but the long laboratory hours conflicted
with his job as a post ofce clerk. After com-
pleting his graduate studies, he accepted a
position at Columbia University. In New
PHOTO: ©YANG LIU/CORBIS
York, he was greatly influenced by the in-
tellectual ferment and Bohemian lifestyle
The author is emeritus professor at State University of
New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry,
Syracuse, NY, USA. E-mail: chall@esf.edu
SCIENCE sciencemag.org
A Maverick Geologist’s Quest
for a Sustainable Future
Mason Inman
Norton, 2016. 429 pp.
of Greenwich Village—and especially by
the energy-oriented Technocrat movement,
which advocated replacing politicians and
business leaders with scientists and engi-
neers. He would go on to hold important
positions at Shell Oil and the United States
Geological Survey (USGS).
Hubbert’s logic for peak oil was simple:
Oil cannot be produced unless it is found.
Because the finding of oil had followed a
roughly normal curve, with a U.S. peak in
the 1950s and a global peak in the 1960s,
he reasoned that production must eventu-
ally follow the same normal-shaped curve.
The logic was beautiful and consistent with
theoretical and empirical data.
Hubbert’s predictions were met with an-
ger and disbelief. Leading the charge were
Hubbert “led the earth sciences kicking and screaming” from a largely qualitative
feld to a predictive science, declared the National Academy of Sciences in 1991.
Texas oilmen. Inman recounts a particularly
tense meeting in which Hubbert confronted
a handful of industry executives about their
oil estimates, which he considered unre-
alistically optimistic. Richard Gonzalez of
Humble Oil gave him “one of the dirtiest
looks I’ve ever seen,” Hubbert later recalled.
“I think that guy could gladly have knifed
me.” The oil industry was joined by a num-
ber of economists who had great faith in
the market to resolve any shortages.
But Hubbert’s most consistent critic was
Vincent McKelvey, a fellow geologist at
USGS. Inman relates their encounters with
relish. In 1961, Hubbert invited McKelvey
to submit a report on the topic of nuclear
fuels for the National Academy of Sciences’
Published by AAAS
Committee on National Resources. He was
surprised to receive a much more exhaustive
report several months later and was partic-
ularly troubled by the report’s large oil dis-
covery predictions. McKelvey was aggressive
and confrontational when Hubbert followed
up. His “mind was made up,” Hubbert later
recalled. “I mean, it was just a waste of time.”
The main diference between McKelvey’s
estimates and Hubbert’s much smaller pre-
dictions arose because McKelvey applied the
“Zapp hypothesis” to plot and extrapolate
the quantity of oil found per foot drilled over
time. McKelvey assumed that the United
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States would continue to find oil at the previ-
ous rate of some 120 barrels of oil per foot
drilled, which he used to estimate future
production. Hubbert showed that the rate of
discovery was actually declining.
Hubbert was ultimately vin-
dicated when the production
of the oil in the United States
peaked in 1970 (2). It declined
nearly every year until 2008,
when new fracking technolo-
gies reversed the decline.
Where does this leave us to-
day? The answer is not as un-
equivocal as I once thought.
Global production of conven-
tional oil has remained more or
less flat since about 2005 (Hub-
bert’s predicted “undulating
plateau”), but new technologies
have enabled the exploitation of
low-grade source rocks in North
Dakota and Texas and ever
deeper ofshore exploration.
This has led to a second, somewhat smaller,
U.S. oil peak, which appears to be on the de-
cline as well. However, these new reserves
are much more expensive to harness, caus-
ing a continued decline in energy return on
investment. In Hubbert’s words, “when the
energy cost of recovering a barrel of oil be-
comes greater than the energy content of the
oil, production will cease no matter what the
monetary price may be.”
REFERENCES
1. M. King Hubbert, Science 109, 103 (1949).
2. U.S. Energy Information Administration;
www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.
ashx?n=pet&s=mcrfpus2&f=a.
10.1126/science.aaf2220
8 APRIL 2016 • VOL 352 ISSUE 6282 155