M. King Hubbert

Marion King Hubbert was an American geologist and geophysicist, born October 5, 1903 in San Saba, Texas and died October 11, 1989 in Bethesda, Maryland, who founded the theory of peak oil. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1926, a master's in 1928 and a doctorate in 1937, all from the University of Chicago, spanning geology, mathematics and physics, and went on to work as a geologist for Amerada Petroleum, a geophysics instructor at Columbia University, a senior analyst for the wartime Board of Economic Warfare, a researcher at Shell Oil Company from 1943 to 1964, a geophysicist with the United States Geological Survey from 1964 to 1976, and a professor at both Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for developing the theory that petroleum production from a given region follows a bell-shaped curve over time, and in 1956 he used the theory to predict that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970, a forecast that proved accurate when production peaked in 1970 and became the founding demonstration of peak oil analysis.