Yesterday evening, I spent some time visiting peak oil-sites, something I’ve been doing now and then for quite some time (is it just me, or is the (Swedish) media underreporting this?). This time, I read Kenneth S. Deffeyes’s pages.
Deffeyes is a Princeton geologist, and his message about oil is quite clear:
In 2005, world oil production stopped growing and oil prices shot up uncontrollably. My graph of production versus price is now two weeks old and the price is already off the top of the paper. This morning, West Texas Intermediate is $130 per barrel. In Econ 101, they taught us that increasing prices would enlarge the supply. The economists may have envisioned a large inventory of oil wells, temporarily shut down because of low oil prices.
What happened? We hit “peak oil” – also called “Hubbert’s peak,” – a geological limitation to the oil supply in the ground. With no additional supplies, a bidding war began in 2005 over the remaining oil in the ground.
More here and on other places on his website; there are also a couple of books by him on the subject of peak oil.
I am surprised I got such a good night’s sleep.
It was not the global political implications of the peak oil advocate that made me write this blog post, though (for a discussion of these grave things, head over to a post at Dialy Kos and its quickly filling list of comments).
No, this time I was more interested in Deffeyes’s biography. Born in 1931, he did his PhD at Princeton and then worked for a number of years at Shell, followed by University of Minnesota before he joined the Princeton faculty in 1967.
He describes Shell as an interesting milieu:
In the fall of 1958, Ken rejoined Shell at their research laboratory in Houston. It was an incredible postdoctoral education. Top-of-the-line physicists, mathematicians, and chemists were there, eager and willing to collaborate on geological problems. Progress was incredibly rapid.
His account of Shell piqued my interest, and I wonder if there are publications on the role of Shell and similar companies in the development of post-war geosciences.
It was another Shell geoscientist, M. King Hubbert, who, in a 1956 paper, showed that the US oil production would peak fifteen years later, which it also did; work which has been central to the idea of peak oil. Just like Deffeyes, Hubbert moved back-and-forth between leading academic departments and Shell.
Like many other historians of post-war science, Jean-Paul Gaudillière just to mention one, I am interested in the traffic of scientists, ideas, practices, tools, resources in and out of companies and academic settings. Shell might be one place to explore.
(This has probably been done, but since I’m not up to date on the history of geology, I’ve missed it.)
