Hubbert's Peak

Peak Performance

Rather than a geological formation to be scaled by extreme sporting enthusiasts - as the name might imply - Hubbert’s Peak is a description of the likely course of the supply of oil in the decades to come. As such, it is obviously important to an economy suffering under the twin ills of sluggish performance and turmoil in the Middle East.

M. King Hubbert was an American geophysicist and geologist who predicted in 1956 that U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s. Hubbert made important contributions to the science of fluid dynamics and the behavior of rock bodies. He became a research scientist at the Shell Oil lab in Houston, where he made his estimates of oil production, and later worked at the U.S. Geological Survey.

In 1956, Hubbert’s analysis was almost universally rejected, if not condemned, perhaps in part because he reputedly had a contrarian, combative personality. Five minutes before he made his prediction in a speech at the American Petroleum Institute, his headquarters pleaded with him on the phone to withdraw the prediction. Hubbert went ahead and delivered his pronouncement. Lo and behold, in 1970, U.S. domestic oil production...