WILD CARDS - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 180

to have hit a wall. h e idea of peak oil—that world oil production had
maxed out and was now headed downward—was hot.
h en, just as prices peaked and plummeted beginning in the summer
of 2008, the talk of peak oil largely disappeared. h e pendulum swung
toward the bears. Ed Morse, a top Wall Street energy analyst, wrote an
essay for the journal Foreign Af airs titled “Low and Behold: Making the
Most of Cheap Oil.” Peak oil, he and others triumphantly declared, had
been proven wrong. Instead, with Saudi production climbing and pros-
pects from Canada to Brazil on the rise—an incipient U.S. oil boom
was still not on most people's radars—the world was in for a new period
of oil market ease.
It was not the i rst time peak oil fears rose to prominence before
being dashed. It was the fourth . 2 h e i rst episode unfolded in the early
years of the twentieth century. In 1909, the U.S. Geological Survey
reviewed the state of domestic oil resources and came to a deeply
pessimistic conclusion: the United States would exhaust its supply of
crude by 1935. 3 Soon, World War I led to a surge in U.S. oil demand,
sending prices skyward and further reinforcing worries about dwindling
supplies. By the 1920s, though, fears subsided. Spurred by high prices,
entrepreneurial spirits discovered and developed vast and easily acces-
sible reserves of oil in Texas and Oklahoma; the United States would
rest easy for a while.
But peak oil fears returned two decades later in the wake of World
War II. Military demand and pessimistic government audits of U.S.
resources once again catalyzed fears of impending ruin. Yet surprise
production gains, from California and the Rockies to Texas and the
Gulf of Mexico, quickly reversed the trend. 4 Combined with the rise of
the Middle East as a critical source of oil, fears were again put to rest.
h e next peak oil scare would arrive like clockwork a couple of
decades later. h is time, though, a patina of scientii c logic accompa-
nied it. In 1956, M. King Hubbert, a Shell Oil geologist, argued that oil
i eld production should inevitably follow something called a “logistic”
curve, rising gradually and then more rapidly, l at ening of at a peak,
and then falling continuously down the other side. h e peak would
be reached once half the oil in a i eld was produced—and the lower
forty-eight states were quickly approaching that point. Hubbert himself