US President John Kennedy asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to evaluate the country's natural resources. Hubbert authored the section of NAS report on energy resources in which he abandoned the traditional method of estimating reserves - analyzing geologic formations - because it yielded a wide variety of estimates, most of which obviously had to be grossly wrong.

Hubbert based the estimates for his report on discoveries vs. the rate of exploration. His figure was 170 billion barrels, very close to the figures which became widely accepted a decade later. In this report Hubbert also dealt with natural gas supplies and he forecast they would peak in the mid 1970s. The government did what it often does in controversial matters, nothing. Since these were predictions about the fairly near future, we just sat around and waited to see what would happen.

Because his estimates were barely one-third of the Geologic Survey's latest estimate, his work was almost completely excluded from the report's executive summary, often the only section of such voluminous reports read by officials. "The USGS estimate included a prediction of 200 billion barrels plus 300 billion barrels that could be recovered through technological and economic advances. I was trying to the tell the President as plainly as I knew, and beyond him to tell the public that we had better start getting ready for this thing (the energy shortage) now", Hubbert said. "But the influence of this report was as close to zero as possible."