Building Houston's Petroleum Expertise: Humble Oil, Environmental Knowledge, and the Architecture of Industrial Research

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• Building Houston's Petroleum Expertise:Humble Oil, Environmental Knowledge, and the Architecture of Industrial Research
• B. Jack Hanly (bio)

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Humble Oil Building with its open plaza and podium base. From Author's Collection.

In a 1956 speech to the American Petroleum Institute, noted geologist and geophysicist M. King Hubbert made a series of predictions that would shake the oil industry to its core. Hubbert, a research scientist at Shell Oil, laid out his forecasts for global and domestic crude oil production, calculated via logarithmic functions. Hubbert observed that the industry had done a fairly good job of charting past progress and near-term market conditions. But oil's long-range future remained a riddle. In an effort to solve it, Hubbert used a method of extrapolation drawn from the studies of mining district life cycles by the British economic geologist D. F. Hewett. Hubbert's model found that coal and oil exhibited increasing rates of production for a period before leveling off and then decreasing at a similarly accelerating rate of decline—a bell-curve shape that would become known as "Hubbert's peak." Hubbert's prediction estimated that domestic oil production in the United States would peak in 1970, while global production would do so around 2000. Hubbert's clarion call did not stifle the post-war gospel of plenty; instead, it triggered vehement resistance by the industry that funded his research. Hubbert shared few peers in resource forecasting at this time, but those who did claim to be experts in his field declared market mechanisms and technological innovation would sustain the nation's resources for decades to come.¹ [End Page 63]

While the story of Hubbert's peak oil prediction and subsequent vindication are well known, less attention has been paid to the broader urban dynamics and architectural supports that set the stage for his insights. Hubbert carried out his research within a landscape of burgeoning Sunbelt oil research centers. By the 1970s, Houston became the prime location for all manner of oil industry research activity due to executive oversight and the proximity of extraction points. Indeed, the city transformed into a global capital of energy research and expertise, even as the tremors of resource scarcity began to puncture its cornucopian imagination. This paper addresses the architectural and urban configurations of the postwar oil industry in and around Houston, Texas with particular attention to structures for knowledge production. If Hubbert's thesis presented an existential threat to industry leaders anticipating a future of incredible prosperity, this paper analyzes the buildings and landscapes that mediated or resisted his uncomfortable reality.² It therefore primarily looks at one of Hubbert's staunchest opponents: Humble Oil Company. Humble Oil's president, Morgan J. Davis, published many vehement retorts to the peak oil thesis and was, in the words of Hubbert himself, a "chauvinistic Texan [who] proposed increasing crude reserves by definition, arbitrarily." Although Davis appeared to Hubbert a willfully ignorant player dismissing the rigors of science, the company he oversaw was in fact carefully attuned to the business opportunities afforded by the burgeoning culture of postwar technoscience.³

Examining three scales of spatial development by Humble Oil, it appears that the manifold research laboratories, corporate office towers, and town developments rising in and around Houston reflected a growing interest in both the material and immaterial dimensions of oil. The paper argues that, for the oil industry, architecture functioned as both the administrative site of extractive activity and an epistemological landscape of oil-based environmental knowledge. In other words, these new facilities firmly planted oil production in urban space while generating information assets in pursuit of the industry's long-term viability. Oil research centers such as the one led by Hubbert can be seen as important parts of what climate historian Paul Edwards referred to as the industry's knowledge infrastructures. For Edwards, these are "the robust networks of people, artifacts, and institutions that generate, share, and [End Page 64] maintain specific knowledge about the human and natural worlds." While some environmental and energy historians depict the effect of industry and extraction on the natural world as rapacious, they overlook a parallel tendency...