For a minute there I thought I had to get off my couch, when all the while the fact is we don't have to do anything much but keep things afloat for just a few decades more! In fact, we'd best shut up about PO, because if our offspring finds out we knew about it all along, they'll turn and wring our necks come 2036!
Posted: Wed Mar 09, 2005 12:06 pm Post subject: Re: Michael Lynch - Disputing Peak Oil
Elijah wrote:
FatherOfTwo wrote:
Could someone please point me to where Michael Lynch's argument(s) are scientifically refuted? I've done a search here on po.com, and read a few of the resultant posts, but I haven't found a solid reply to his statements, particularly:
Quote:
The many inconsistencies and errors, along with the ignorance of most prior research, indicates that the current school of Hubbert modelers have not discovered new, earth-shaking results but rather joined the large crowd of those who have found that large bodies of data often yield particular shapes, from which they attempt to divine physical laws. The work of the Hubbert modelers has proven to be incorrect in theory, and based heavily on assumptions that the available evidence shows to be wrong. They have repeatedly misinterpreted political and economic effects as reflecting geological constraints, and misunderstood the causality underlying exploration, discovery and production. The primary flaw in Hubbert-type models is a reliance on URR as a static number rather than a dynamic variable, changing with technology, knowledge, infrastructure and other factors, but primarily growing. Campbell and Laherrere claim to have developed better analytical methods to resolve this problem, but their own estimates have been increasing, and increasingly rapidly.
Sometimes the PO crowd reminds me of those religious people who interpret every headline as a sure sign of Jesus' imminent return. After running outside to look at the sky a couple of times, it's hard to take them seriously.
Unlike Jesus' return, there is no question we will run out of oil someday, but someday could be a little farther away than a lot of people here would like to believe.
you are missing the boat elijah. sorry that is a Noah joke It's not about running out of oil as much as it is running out of cheap oil.
Joined: Oct 15, 2004 Posts: 2082 Location: Arkansas
Posted: Wed Mar 09, 2005 9:52 pm Post subject:
Its more than a little ironic that old Michael the economist says that there is no reason why oil should be so high, that geology isn't the problem. Well, if the economist is saying that geology isn't the cause of high oil prices, that only leaves economics as the explanation, which he, the economist, can't explain. So, if the economist has no economic explanation (notice he no longer cites a terror premium, he just scratches his head), but if the economist doesn't have an economic explanation, maybe he ought to leave the geological explanation to the geologists, like Campbell, for an answer.
Joined: May 19, 2004 Posts: 892 Location: San Francisco, California
Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2005 12:37 pm Post subject:
I notice that Mike Lynch has been posting on the energyresources Yahoo! group lately. This could be a good place to observe (and participate if you follow the guidelines of the group) in a constructive and interesting debate.
After re-reading Lynch's paper, The New Pessimism about Petroleum Resources: Debunking the Hubbert Model (and Hubbert Modelers), and noticing the following conclusion,
Michael C. Lynch wrote:
The result has been exactly as predicted in Lynch (1996) for this method: a series of predictions of near-term peak and decline, which have had to be repeatedly revised upwards and into the future. So much so as to suggest that the authors themselves are providing evidence that oil resources are under no strain, but increasing faster than consumption!
I would not characterize Lynch as denying PO entirely or denying that conventional oil is a finite resource. He merely disputes the claims by Deffeyes, Campbell, and others that PO will arrive very soon, i.e., within five or ten years. I would put him with Peter Odell in the "PO later" category. Both Odell and Lynch have hinted that later might be about thirty years from now.
Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 4:16 pm Post subject: Reply from Mike Lynch
Hi, guys, I'm sorry if I have been neglecting you. The board sent me a kind invitation to join, but then I got swamped with travel, etc. (For some odd reason, everyone is interested in oil these days.)
My interpretation of high oil prices right now is that investors (mutual funds, etc.) are pouring money into commodity index funds, thinking a) that market tightness could be coupled with new supply disruptions and b) longer term, capacity can't be replaced. Since oil production has been rising sharply the past 2 years, it is hard to see how geology can be driving high oil prices. (Capacity constraints are another matter.)
Hubbert modeling, to my thinking, is curve-fitting, nearly the same as trying to find an equation that fits automobile production, the stock market, etc. Lots of things fit S-curves, bell curves, and so forth, but it doesn't mean that they are predictive.
Modeling oil production at the global level is, most of the time, a question of modeling oil consumption. In the end, you need to consider, in a general way, the resource base for an area and what is required to replace production and/or increase it (or not). Prices and government policy play a major role in that, country by country.
What is that guy on ? (apart from maybe an oil company pay-roll)
Why would it be in the interest of an oil company to discredit peak oil to keep the oil price low? Wouldn't it be more rational (if unethical) to insist the peak is actually going to be here any day now (just not our fields) to keep prices artificially high on speculation and fatten profits?
1) Initial production of conventional oil was 0, and final oil production will be 0, since there is a finite amount of oil to extract.
2) Annual production in between the initial and final numbers will be a positive number, and if you made a graph where the x-axis is the year and the y-axis is that year's production, the area under the resultant curve--whatever shape it may be--would be the ultimately recoverable oil.
3) Somewhere on the curve--again, whatever shape it happens to be--there will be a peak year for production. That peak year could be 2004 if some major cataclysm destroys all humanity in 2005, in which event the peak would be defined not by geology, but by catastrophe.
Dude, you reminded me of my calculus day!
Actually Rolle's theorem from elementary functional analysis predicts a peak lol
Lets see if I remember it correctly
Let f:[a,b]->R function differentiable in the closed interval [a,b]
If f[a]=f[b], then there is a c point where the first derivative of the function is equal to zero
But if a function is differentiable, and has a derivative equal to zero, then that point is an extremum (maximum or minimum)
So think of f as the production to date, its first derivative is the rate of production (i.e. how much they are pumping from the ground per unit time e.g. day). So what does that mean? That there is a point where the production will be maximum. Before that point, the production rate will de increasing, after that it will be decreasing till it goes to zero.
Come to think of it, it is not even college math, probably senior high math.
Not even an economist can beat both geology and math
_________________ "Nuclear power has long been to the Left what embryonic-stem-cell research is to the Right--irredeemably wrong and a signifier of moral weakness."Esquire Magazine,12/05
The genetic code is commaless and so are my posts.
Modeling oil production at the global level is, most of the time, a question of modeling oil consumption. In the end, you need to consider, in a general way, the resource base for an area and what is required to replace production and/or increase it (or not). Prices and government policy play a major role in that, country by country.
Mr Lynch, some of us around here have been addressing those issues. Anyone with a computer and a decent fitting package can see WHY EIA modelling is absurd (had to say that, sorry) and how one can generate multiple compatible predictions. Having said that, shouldn't one adopt a play safe stance and assume that the Peak is here (even if it is not).
My position on using Non linear regression tools on the time series that BP published ... is that the peak is going to occur in this decade.
Simple mathematical arguments (i.e. peak production starts from zero, has to go down to zero, time is finite, production is a mathematically continuous curve) shows why a peak has to exist.
BTW most of the modeling approaches (even the ones at ASPO) would have been thrown away if submitted in any decent medical journal (my field) due to statistical inadequaceis _________________ "Nuclear power has long been to the Left what embryonic-stem-cell research is to the Right--irredeemably wrong and a signifier of moral weakness."Esquire Magazine,12/05
The genetic code is commaless and so are my posts.
What we know:
- world production is a sum of individual field productions;
- once a field goes into depletion there is no way back
- new oil fields are small in size
- discoveries have peaked in the 80s;
- reserve growth is going flat since 2003;
- reserve growth is mainly on paper (few appraisal wells)
- demand is growing rapidly
We don't need to do any curve fitting to see that we may have a problem! _________________ ______________________________________
http://GraphOilogy.blogspot.com
Hey khebab,
Did I get the right theorem?
Is it Rolle's, or the extreme value the one that guarantees a peak? _________________ "Nuclear power has long been to the Left what embryonic-stem-cell research is to the Right--irredeemably wrong and a signifier of moral weakness."Esquire Magazine,12/05
The genetic code is commaless and so are my posts.
Hey khebab,
Did I get the right theorem?
Is it Rolle's, or the extreme value the one that guarantees a peak?
You're quit right, a more general form is the Mean Value Theorem:
If f (x) is a differentiable function with a continuous derivative and if a < b are any two points then there is a point c between a and b at which:
f'(c)= (f(b) - f(a)) / (b - a) _________________ ______________________________________
http://GraphOilogy.blogspot.com
Doesn't it say at least one point?
Guarantees at least ONE maximum, maybe more but totally rules out a plateau as some of the economists think. It is due to the finite nature of oil. Builds up and declines.
So from a mathematical standpoint the following are the only possible outcomes:
1) Single Peak
2) Multiple Peaks (but with decline)
3) A plateau and decline
If there is no break in consumption due to high prices .... single peak, otherwise a multiple small peaks and then nose dive.
There is no way the no-sayers can refute that. They can try by saying that the production is not continuous, singly differentiable ... but this is stupid. Oil is liquid and it flows and at first approximation the flow is laminar hence differentiable
Why hasn't anyone thought about this before? (I only thought about when I read the initial post, it clicked memories from the 1 st day out of High School _________________ "Nuclear power has long been to the Left what embryonic-stem-cell research is to the Right--irredeemably wrong and a signifier of moral weakness."Esquire Magazine,12/05
The genetic code is commaless and so are my posts.
Joined: May 22, 2004 Posts: 1416 Location: Ottawa, Ontario
Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 10:34 pm Post subject:
spike wrote:
Hubbert modeling, to my thinking, is curve-fitting, nearly the same as trying to find an equation that fits automobile production, the stock market, etc. Lots of things fit S-curves, bell curves, and so forth, but it doesn't mean that they are predictive.
I would tend to agree with you that it is curve fitting, or in other words an empirical prediction. However empirical predictions are not bad things, if they're all you've got, they're better than nothing. There are however, fundamental differences between a hubbert curve and empirically predicting the stock market. Efficient markets (which stock markets aim to be) are inherently unpredictable. You cannot say the same thing about oil production.
Quote:
Modeling oil production at the global level is, most of the time, a question of modeling oil consumption. In the end, you need to consider, in a general way, the resource base for an area and what is required to replace production and/or increase it (or not). Prices and government policy play a major role in that, country by country.
Of course modelling production is the equivalent of modeling consumption and vise versa. That is basically saying that when production starts decreasing, there will either be demand destruction and or higher prices. It certainly doesn't mean that we will always find the oil necessary to meet future predicted demand at current prices. _________________ Biofuels: The "What else we got to burn?" answer to peak oil.
The suggestion that I'm on an oil company payroll is entertaining; many of the pessimistic views come from people with oil company support. Matt Simmons comes to mind. And some oil companies seem to disagree with me, in whole or part (Exxon, Total).
As I pointed out in my article in Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance (and elsewhere), NONE OF THE MODELS HAS A GOOD RATE OF SUCCESS. Investment data is poor, drilling data is poor, field size data is uncertain. Neither volumetric, engineering or economic models work very well.
Production has to start at zero and end at zero, but that tells us nothing about the shape of the curve in between. In fact, Hubbert admitted that himself. You can (and often do) have multiple peaks, sharp peaks, long rising or falling plateaus, etc. Depends on how you define the region, first, but also geologic, geographical, political and economic factors. The ASPO models, Laherrere's creaming curves, Deffeyes' curve do not factor that in.
Khebab, most of your comments are wrong or irrelevant. There is no sign that reserve growth is dropping, reserve additions are replacing production, and fields (and regions) can decline and then recover, happens quite often.
Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2005 4:28 pm Post subject: reserve growth from smiley
What makes you thing reserve growth has been falling for 30 years?
Mike Lynch
smiley wrote:
I can find no way to justify such an assumption. Reserve growth has been falling for the past 30 years. I can see no reason why that trend will suddenly be reversed.
Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2005 4:33 pm Post subject: Re: Michael Lynch - Disputing Peak Oi
Actually, you misquote me, I didn't say 'new physical laws' but they are claiming to have developed methods such as the creaming curve and parabolic fractals (new methods, or improved applications) that have given estimates of URR that are stable and robust. That is my dispute.
Mike
[quote="pilferage"]
Quote:
The many inconsistencies and errors, along with the ignorance of most prior research, indicates that the current school of Hubbert modelers have not discovered new, earth-shaking results but rather joined the large crowd of those who have found that large bodies of data often yield particular shapes, from which they attempt to divine physical laws.
There is no attempt at 'finding' new physical laws, the modelers are attempting to make a rough estimate concerning the date of the Earth's peak in oil extraction.
Quote:
The work of the Hubbert modelers has proven to be incorrect in theory, and based heavily on assumptions that the available evidence shows to be wrong.
The work of those modeling this is fundamentally sound, stating it isn't implies there is an infinite supply of oil readily available, and since (to the best of my knowledge) the earth isn't inifinite, any subset of the earth isn't infinite either.
As per the assumptions, they must be refuted on a case by case basis, simply stating they're wrong is analogous to a proof using the vaunted ISS (I Said So) theorem!
You again misrepresent what I say. I argue that their methods of estimating URR are incorrect, that there is no evidence that we are close to half of the URR being produced (and thus a supply-driven peak). I do not imply that there is an infinite amount of oil available.
Mike
Quote:
They have repeatedly misinterpreted political and economic effects as reflecting geological constraints, and misunderstood the causality underlying exploration, discovery and production.
Who, what, why, where, and how? Sounds like the ISS theorem strikes again!
Read their work. Campbell, Deffeyes, Bentley and others dismiss the notion that economics effects oil supply, implying that 'economists' think higher prices will increase the existence of oil in the earth. (They are often unclear in this as so many others.) Examples are rampant in their work, and I cited some of them in my article (quoted above).
Mike Lynch
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It's not about running out of oil as much as it is running out of cheap oil.
