The Oracle of Oil: A Maverick Geologist's Quest for a Sustainable Future

  • Mason Inman
W. W. Norton: 2016. 9780393239683 | ISBN: 978-0-3932-3968-3
Credit: Illustration by Rebekka Dunlap

A scientist's work does not always intersect neatly with the events of their time, but that was the good fortune of US geologist and oilman Marion King Hubbert (1903–89). After labouring for decades to perfect forecasting of the oil-production limit, he saw his efforts validated in the energy crises of the early 1970s. His approach would later be known as Hubbert peak theory.

Journalist Mason Inman's meticulous biography The Oracle of Oil follows Hubbert from his youth on the plains of Texas through the Great Depression, the Second World War and the rise of US President Ronald Reagan in 1981. But its scope is much more expansive. In Hubbert's story, Inman has found a meditation on the booms and busts that marked twentieth-century economic growth. Hubbert's iconoclastic career forms a perfect arc, from oil's troubling oversupply in the 1920s to its relative scarcity after the peak of US production in 1971, when the US economy suffered oil shocks.

As Inman shows, Hubbert's impact extends beyond oil: it is an early manifestation of ecological economics. At the end of his career, Hubbert remained concerned about nuclear waste; was convinced that high rates of growth were environmentally destructive; and conjectured that solar power might be the most viable energy solution. With regard to growth or sustainability, Hubbert's work is an overlooked contribution to US economic history.

Arriving at the University of Chicago in Illinois in 1924 with little money but no shortage of ambition, Hubbert saw geology as a wide-open field, and gate-crashed it. With precocious brilliance, he began to identify gaps and disorganization in its practices, and published his first paper, on fault classifications, as an undergraduate. In 1930, he was head-hunted by Columbia University in New York City to direct a new effort in geophysics.

Here, Inman's biography reveals its thoughtful design, tracing the youthful roots of Hubbert's formidable achievements. The undergrad pondering Earth's folds one summer later becomes a breakthrough geologist, solving complex scaling problems. The boy surrounded by oil rigs becomes a Shell executive, aggressively pursuing the hydrological and structural complexities of oilfield exploration. The young man who questioned religious faith becomes a nonconformist US Geological Survey (USGS) researcher, insisting that popular forecasts are built less on data than on optimism.

Inman's direct, explanatory style is well suited to describing the evolution of Hubbert's thinking. At Columbia, Hubbert began to ponder the S-curve of growth that has long fascinated observers of economies, biology and natural-resource extraction. He perfected his technique over decades, from rough estimates of ultimately recoverable US oil reserves to his eventual winning model: an advanced calculation that incorporated past production, yield per foot of exploration and the tricky variable of reserve growth.

Inman does not, however, cite the work of UK economist William Stanley Jevons, whose 1865 warning about the economy's over-reliance on coal prefigures the Hubbert story. Jevons died in 1882, so never saw his prediction come true: British coal output peaked in 1913. Hubbert, by contrast, was feted with numerous awards, including the Rockefeller Service Award in 1977, and broad coverage in The New York Times when his previous reports for the government and the USGS were acknowledged for their accuracy.

Hubbert's forecast was not the end of the US oil story. After his death, production continued to languish, in accordance with his forecast. But with fracking, the United States lifted oil production as recently as last year to levels close to the 1970 peak. Oil production is now falling again owing to a price bust — global supply capabilities were created for demand that failed to materialize. Inman does a fine job of handling this recent history.

The Oracle of Oil offers valuable insights beyond energy. In the demand-side bust of the 1930s, it shows Hubbert thinking deeply about the surplus of labour created partly, in his view, by the effects of powerful oil married to the newest machines: cars, construction equipment and aircraft. Hubbert was co-founder of Technocracy, a group of New York intellectuals aiming to prevent future economic dislocations. Two publications by keen observers of the low-growth problem — Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Seuil, 2013) and Robert Gordon's 2012 paper 'Is US Economic Growth Over?' (see go.nature.com/wblxig) — also explore this territory of limits and sustainability.

In Inman's work, the oilman emerges as a restless and prescient figure concerned with the environment. In writing the first biography of Hubbert, Inman has retrieved, if not rescued, the story of a scientist who has much to offer to today's energy conundrum.