Princeton University emeritus professor and renowned oil analyst Ken Deffeyes thinks that the all-time production peak for petroleum, or “peak oil,” will occur on or around this Thanksgiving. He will discuss the evidence supporting his theory at the Lauritsen Memorial Lecture, to take place at 8 p.m. on Thursday, December 1, in Beckman Auditorium on the California Institute of Technology campus…
Deffeyes is one of the more pessimistic of the prognosticators. If he is correct, the global oil peak will just have occurred when he presents his Caltech lecture on December 1. Afterward, the commodity will become more and more scarce–and therefore more and more expensive and hard to obtain. The end result will be massive economic and social disruptions in a 21st-century world that has fueled itself for decades with cheap and plentiful energy.
Deffeyes has spent a lifetime in the oil business and the academic study of petroleum. Born in the middle of an Oklahoma City oilfield to a pioneering petroleum engineer, Deffeyes joined the Shell research lab in Houston after graduate school. At Shell he was a colleague of M. King Hubbert, who was the first person to predict that production peaks were even possible.
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