Lauritsen Lecture: Ken Deffeyes: The Peak of World Oil Production: Thanksgiving Day, 2005

The methods which M. King Hubbert used to predict the peak of United States oil production can now be applied to world production. Dr. Deffeyes's analysis places the world oil production peak on Thanksgiving Day, 2005. Severe consequences are to be expected for transportation and for agriculture. It may be too late to arrange for a soft landing; the consequences of a hard landing are not cheerful to contemplate.

Ken Deffeyes was born in the middle of the Oklahoma City oilfield, a son of a pioneering petroleum engineer. In addition to his academic studies, he held a variety of summer jobs in the oil industry. After his undergraduate education at the Colorado School of Mines and graduate work at Princeton, he joined the Shell research lab in Houston. At the Shell lab, he was a colleague of M. King Hubbert, who made the celebrated prediction that US oil production would peak in the early 1970s.

Deffeyes taught briefly at the University of Minnesota and at Oregon State University before joining the Princeton faculty in 1967. He continued to be involved in the oil industry as a consultant and as an expert witness. After his retirement in 1998, he published Hubbert's Peak and Beyond Oil about the peak of world oil production.

Many readers know about Deffeyes because of his appearance in John McPhee's books Basin and Range, Assembling California, and Annals of the Former World.

The Lauritsen Memorial Lecture commemorates two former professors of physics at Caltech: Charles C. Lauritsen and Thomas Lauritsen. Together they served the Institute for more than 68 years, and their commitment to excellence played a significant role in Caltech's development and accomplishments.

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