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

Author:Mason Inman [Inman, Mason]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2016-04-10T16:00:00+00:00

IN MID-1968, AS US elections approached, Hubbert got word that the State Department was eager to see his latest forecasts, to use in a report for the next US president.

President Lyndon Johnson had pushed the United States further into war in Vietnam, but his policies grew increasingly unpopular, and he decided not to run for reelection. Robert Kennedy then entered the race, quickly becoming the Democrats’ front-runner, winning some early primaries—but then, like his brother, he was assassinated. The leading Democratic candidate wound up being Hubert Humphrey, the lackluster vice president. With antiwar protests and civil rights demonstrations sometimes turning violent, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, it seemed to many the country was growing lawless. Promising to restore order, Richard Nixon entered the race, contending once again for the Republicans’ nomination.

Hubbert was then in the midst of working on a new report for the National Academy of Sciences, an update of his 1962 report, but didn’t have it ready. He passed along word to the State Department that the new report would have “no significant changes in either the data or conclusions.” He still expected US oil production to peak very soon.

Before the 1967 Middle East conflict, Texas had been gradually raising its allowables to feed America’s fast-growing consumption. After that conflict, the state kept its allowables above 40 percent—the first time in a decade they’d remained that high. The United States was having difficulty boosting production enough to keep up with rising consumption and to hold imports at tolerable levels.

Around this time, one of the US government’s top oil experts, James Akins, grew deeply concerned. Akins was head of the US State Department’s Office of Fuels and Energy and also an expert on the Middle East. He helped coordinate with the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a coalition of the non-Communist world’s industrialized nations, which made them also the world’s largest oil importers. The OECD had an Oil Committee that was meant to help its members coordinate to avoid shortages. During the 1967 Middle East conflict, the United States had called for the Oil Committee to declare an emergency, but European members voted against this, arguing that there was little reason to worry. When the Arab cutback and embargo fizzled, the Europeans seemed justified.

In late 1968, Akins traveled to Paris to attend another Oil Committee meeting, where he made a surprising admission. He warned them that America’s spare capacity was almost gone.

This “was a triggering point,” recalled Ulf Lantzke, then head of West Germany’s Energy Department. “From that point onwards, I was trying to turn around energy policies in Germany.” But Lantzke found it difficult, “so deep-seated was the political belief that energy supplies were no problem.”

Unlike the Europeans, the US government did show some signs of concern. Richard Nixon won the 1968 presidential election, and once in office he launched a major effort called the Cabinet Task Force on Oil Import Control. This assessment, overseen by Nixon’s top advisers, would take a fresh look at America’s fast-rising dependence on foreign oil.

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