called the Great Engineer. Members wore uniforms and saluted when the Great Engineer walked into the room. Hubbert served as its educational director for 15 years and wrote the manual by which it operated. “I had a box seat at the Depression,” he later said. “We had manpower and raw materials. Yet we shut the country down.” Technocracy envisioned a no-growth society and the elimination of the price system, to be replaced by the wise administration of the Technocrats. Hubbert wanted to promote a social structure that was based on “physical relations, thermodynamics” rather than a monetary system. He believed that a “pecuniary” system, misinformed by the “hieroglyphics” of economists, was the road to ruin.
Although cantankerous and combative, Hubbert was, as a teacher, demanding and compelling. “I found him to be arrogant, egotistical, dogmatic, and intolerant of work he perceived to be incorrect,” recalled one admiring former student. “But above all, I judged him to be a great scientist dedicated to solving problems based on simple physical and mathematical principles. He told me that he had a limited lifetime in which to train and pass on what he knew, and that he couldn’t waste his time with people that couldn’t comprehend.”
Hubbert did not have an easy relationship with his Columbia colleagues. When Columbia failed to give him tenure, he packed up and went to work as a geologist for Shell Oil.10
Collegiality was not one of his virtues. Coworkers found him abrasive, overly confident in his own opinions, dismissive of those who disagreed with him, and ill disguised in his contempt of those with different points of view.
“A gifted scientist, but with deep-seated insecurities,” in the words of one scholar, Hubbert was so overbearing that it was almost painful for others to work with him. At Shell, the young geologists assigned to him never managed to last more than a year. Finally, the first female geologist to graduate from Rice University, Martha Lou Broussard, was sent to him. “Overpopulation” was one of Hubbert’s favorite themes. During her job interview, he asked Broussard if she intended to have children. Then, in order to convince her not to, he told her to go to the blackboard to calculate at exactly what point the world would reach one person per square meter.
From Shell he moved to the U.S. Geological Survey, where he was in a permanent battle with some of his colleagues. “He was the most difficult person I ever worked with,” said Peter Rose, his boss at the USGS.
Yet Hubbert also became recognized as one of the leading figures in the field and made a variety of major contributions, including a seminal paper in 1957, “The Mechanics of Hydraulic Fracturing.” One of his fundamental objectives was to move geology from what he called its “natural-history phase” to “physical science phase,” firmly based in physics, chemistry, and in particular, in rigorous mathematics. “King Hubbert, mathematician that he is,” said the chief geophysicist of one of the oil companies, “based his look ahead on facts, logically and analytically analyzed.” Four decades after turning him down for tenure, Columbia implicitly apologized by awarding him the Vetlesen Prize, one of the highest honors in American geology.11
AT THE PEAK
In the late 1940s, Hubbert’s interest was piqued when he heard another geologist say that 500 years of oil supply remained in the ground. This couldn’t possibly be true, he thought. He started doing his own analysis. In 1956 at a meeting in San Antonio, he unveiled the theory that would forever be linked to his name. He declared that U.S. oil production was likely to hit its peak somewhere between 1965 and 1970. This was what became Hubbert’s Peak.
His prediction was greeted with much controversy. “I wasn’t sure they weren’t going to hang me from the nearest light post,” he said years later. But when U.S. production did hit its peak in 1970, followed by the shock of the 1973 embargo, Hubbert appeared more than vindicated. He was a prophet. He became famous.12
The peaking of U.S. output pointed to a major geopolitical rearrangement. The United States could no longer largely go it alone. All through the 1960s, even with imports, domestic production had supplied 90 percent of demand. No longer. To meet its own growing needs, the United States went from being a minor importer to a major importer, deeply enmeshed in the world oil market. The rapid growth of U.S. oil imports, in turn, was one of the key factors that led to the very tight oil market