Transcript from US House of Representatives via Energy Bulletin
Conservative Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, Chairman of the Projection Forces Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee, gave an hour long presentation on Peak Oil to the US Congress on Monday. This is the full transcript. We hope to get a hold of the graphs used by Mr. Bartlett and will update this article to include them if they come to hand.
[...] Hubbert noticed when the bell curve reached its peak, about half of the oil had been exhausted from the field. Being a scientist, he theorized if you added up a lot of little bell curves, you would get one big bell curve, and if he could know the amount of reserves of oil in the United States, and he was doing this in the 1940s and early 1950s, and could project how much more might be found, he could then predict when the United States would peak in its oil production.
Doing this analysis, he concluded that we would peak in our oil production in 1970. This curve is what is known as Hubbert's Curve. The peak of the curve is what is known as Hubbert's Peak. Sometimes this is called the ``great rollover'' because when you get to the top, you roll over and start down the other side. It is frequently called ``peak oil.'' So peak oil for the United States occurred in 1970, and it is true that every year since then we have pumped less oil and found less oil. The big blue squares here are the actual and Members see they deviated a little from the theoretical as M. King Hubbert predicted, but not all that much.
[Continues at length...]
Read the full transcript...
