A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Hubbert’s Oil Supply Forecast

The emergence of an energy mix is motivated by environmental concerns and by the concern that the production of a dominant non-renewable resource, oil, is coming to an end. M. King Hubbert studied the production of oil, a non-renewable resource, in the continental United States (the forty-eight contiguous states of the United States) as a non-renewable resource. Hubbert (1956) found that oil production in this limited geographic region could be modeled as a function of time. The annual production of oil increased steadily until a maximum was reached, and then began to decline as it became more difficult to find and produce oil. The maximum oil production is considered a peak. Hubbert used his method to predict that peak oil production in the continental United States would occur between 1965 and 1970, and that global oil production would peak around 2000. Crude oil production in the continental United States peaked at 9.4 million barrels per day in 1970. A second peak for the United States occurred in 1988 when Alaskan oil production peaked at 2 million barrels per day. Many experts consider the 1970 oil peak to be a validation of Hubbert’s methodology. Analyses of historical data using Hubbert’s methodology typically predict that world oil production will peak in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

Forecasts based on an analytical fit to historical data can be readily prepared using publicly available data. Figure 93.1 shows a fit of world ...