Rock, how come you never engage the experts at TOD?
I have from time to time over the years, most recently on the MacCondo well disaster thread.
My original reason for staying more on this site was I felt the information I could bring to the table would be helpful to more people. I find I likely spend too much time here as it is. I note that some of the other industry folk migrated away from PO and stay exclusively on TOD. I think either I'm thicker skinned or have more patience than they did.
I do think you need to qualify the term "expert". There is some good analysis done on TOD and there are a handful of experienced oil and gas professionals who report from time to time. But often there are authors who present in an authoritative manner and fail to point out the uncertainties in their analysis/statements which can easily be construed by less knowledgeable folks as "expert opinion". Don't get me wrong I think it is OK to speak with conviction but at the same time you need to acknowledge where the uncertainty lies. This is especially true of what I refer to as "remote sensing" analyses which aren't to do with satellites and the like but rather analyses where you have no direct measure and must infer conclusions based on sparse information. That was the whole point of the Saudi reserves thread of years gone by. It was intended to amalgamate all the bits and bobs of information from various sources and discuss them with respect to what was valid, what wasn't and what was still unknown. I think the best example of someone who was touted as an "expert" but who was far from it in the fields he dabbled in was Matthew Simmons (god rest his soul). For the average person reading his book and viewing his presentations it would appear that he really knew what he was talking about but once you went and looked at all the SPE publications he claimed to have read it was pretty clear that he had likely only read the abstract and worse yet did not really understand what was being said.
