The Impending Oil Shortage | Technology and Society Forum

Kenneth Deffeyes
Professor Emeritus
Department of Geosciences
Princeton University

Sep 19, 2005, 11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Student Center Ballroom

Professor Kenneth Deffeyes predicts that world oil production will peak on Thanksgiving Day 2005. Present high prices reflect an oil supply that is not growing, as well as rapidly increasing demand in China and India. The supply chain is also highly vulnerable to disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. Instead of a simple rise to a new "equilibrium" price, enormous price volatility is to be expected. Join Professor Deffeyes at NJIT on September 19 as he discussed these critial issues and suggests possible remedies.

Kenneth Deffeyes (pronounced d-phase) was born in the middle of the Oklahoma City oilfields. His father was a pioneering petroleum engineer and Ken has summer jobs in the oil industry. He took his undergraduate training in geological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Ken then served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineering and subsequently earned a master's in engineering and a PhD in geology at Princeton University. After working at the Shell Research Laboratory in Houston and teaching briefly at the University of Minnesota and Oregon State University, he joined the Princeton faculty in 1967. During that time, Professor Deffeyes had a supporting role in the development of plate tectonics. Many readers have learned about him through John McPhee's accounts in The New Yorker and the best-selling books Basin and Range, Assembling California, and Annals of the Former World. Since retiring from active teaching in 1998, he has written two books about the approaching world oil crisis: Hubbert's Peak (2001) and Beyond Oil (2005).