The Hubbert curve, utilized to justify peak resources, is fundamentally flawed – it is an impossible prediction model and fails to take reality into account
Deming 23 – (David J. Deming is an American economist and Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, Professor of Education and Economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, David Deming earned a B.S. in economics and a B.A. in political science from Ohio State University in 2002, followed by a M.P.P. from UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy in 2005 and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) in 2010); “M. King Hubbert and the rise and fall of peak oil theory," GeoScienceWorld, https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/aapgbull/article/107/6/851/623376/M-King-Hubbert-and-the-rise-and-fall-of-peak-oil
The definitive presentation of Hubbert’s peak oil theory was in his 1956 paper “Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels,” published in the American Petroleum Institute journal Drilling and Production Practice, but the roots of his paper and model had been laid down decades earlier. The earliest traceable influence on Hubbert’s approach to resource depletion appears to have been the work Cycles in Metal Production by D. F. Hewett (Hewett, 1929; Clark, 1983; Priest, 2014). Hewett was a pessimist. He concluded that “many of our outstanding districts of a few years ago show signs of exhaustion, and we are sustaining or increasing national totals by turning quickly to new sources of lower grade. If science and technique can keep up the pace, we have no cause for concern. Personally, I doubt that they can much longer” (Hewett, 1929, p. 92). In his Technocracy Study Course, Hubbert drew a bell-shaped curve that he claimed was “characteristic of the exploitation of any non-recurrent material, such as all mineral resources” (Hubbert, 1934, p. 101). This explicitly included oil. In 1941, Hubbert published “Economic Transition and Its Human Consequences” in the journal Advanced Management. Therein we find a drawing of a bell-shaped curve that is said to be “descriptive of the rate of production of all non-recurrent mineral resources” (Hubbert, 1941, p. 99). The next sentence is a frank admission that the entire peak oil theory that flourished for several decades was always flawed. Hubbert conceded, “The curve rises to one or more maxima and ultimately declines to zero as the resource is exhausted” (Hubbert, 1941, p. 99). If the curve can have “one or more maxima,” then it has no single peak. If the curve has no predetermined or definable shape, then no estimate of resource depletion can be made, because there is no way to know whether a single peak will not be followed by another peak ad infinitum. The whole point of peak oil theory was to model and predict resource exhaustion. For example, on the basis of a single bell-shaped curve, Campbell and Laherrere (1998) predicted that world oil production would peak shortly after 2000 and then begin a systematic and irreversible decline. However, Hubbert conceded from the beginning that no single model could have any predictive validity. Other critics have also noted that from its very inception the Hubbert model never had any validity for forecasting future oil production and depletion. Lynch (2016, p. 76) concluded “the creator of the Hubbert curve admitted that there was no underlying reason to use a bell curve”; thus, “neither theory nor reality supports the argument.” McCabe (1998, p. 2132) argued that a Hubbert-style analysis “does not hold up to scrutiny of its basic assumptions.” He documented that “the shape of a production curve is as much controlled by the demand for the energy source as it is by its availability” (McCabe, 1998, p. 2132). The historical production of anthracite coal in Pennsylvania has closely followed a symmetric Hubbert curve, but the resource is not exhausted. Production declined because of a decrease in demand (McCabe, 1998, p. 2125).