Kenneth S. Deffeyes

Kenneth S. Deffeyes was a geologist who worked with M. King Hubbert, the creator of the Hubbert peak theory, at the Shell Oil Company research laboratory in Houston, Texas. He claimed Chickasaw ancestry.

Deffeyes made a lively personal impression. McPhee characterized him in Basin and Range (1981): "Deffeyes is a big man with a tenured waistline. His hair flies behind him like Ludwig van Beethoven. He lectures in sneakers. His voice is syllabic, elocutionary, operatic. ... His surname rhymes with 'the maze.'"

Biography Deffeyes earned a B.S. in petroleum geology from the Colorado School of Mines and a Ph.D. in geology from Princeton University, studying under F.B. van Houten.

Deffeyes Ph.D. dissertation research concerned volcanic ashfalls in Nevada that had been altered to zeolites. Not much was known about the potential uses of zeolites, so Deffeyes wrote a review paper on zeolites in sedimentary rocks. This resulted (according to both Deffeyes and John McPhee) in the founding of the natural zeolite industry. Zeolites have important uses in water purification, as catalysts in the petrochemical industry, and as molecular sieves.

In non-fiction In John McPhee's 1981 book Basin and Range, about the origin of Basin and Range topography, Deffeyes teaches geology to McPhee and his readers by analyzing road cuts and the exposed geologic strata that resulted from the construction of Interstate highway 80. On one trip, Deffeyes picks up a piece of Triassic shale near Paterson, New Jersey to demonstrate a common geologic field test: he puts the shale in his mouth and chews it. "If it's gritty, it's a silt bed, and if it's creamy it's a shale," Deffeyes said. McPhee tries it and reports that he wouldn't "have thought to put it in coffee." Of world peak oil production: "There is nothing plausible that could postpone the peak until 2009. Get used to it."