Hubbert curve

It first appeared in "Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels," geologist M. King Hubbert's 1956 presentation to the American Petroleum Institute, as an idealized symmetric curve, during his tenure at the Shell Oil Company.

[1] It has gained a high degree of popularity in the scientific community for predicting the depletion of various natural resources.

This is because a steep drop in the production implies that global oil production will decline so rapidly that the world will not have enough time to develop sources of energy to replace the energy now used from oil, possibly leading to drastic social and economic impacts.

Hubbert models have been used to predict the production trends of various resources, such as natural gas (Hubbert's attempt in the late 1970s resulted in an inaccurate prediction that natural gas production would fall dramatically in the 1980s), Coal, fissionable materials, Helium, transition metals (such as copper), and water.

At least one researcher has attempted to create a Hubbert curve for the whaling industry and caviar,[2] while another applied it to cod.