[dissident]

What an idiotic graph. The Gaussian would only result, and only approximately, from a convolution operation on the individual field production curves. This is the main idea behind the Central Limit Theorem. Year by year summation of production from all the individual fields is not equivalent to a convolution operator being applied.

P_global(t) = f_1(f_2(f_3(....(t)))) <=/=> P_global(t) = Sum_k=1,n (f_k(t))

[rockdoc123]

Well I don't think it is an "idiotic graph" simply because what was done was to create a bunch of typical wells in a field where production is ramped up quickly and maintained at the highest sustainable rate for a few years , let to go through gradual decline and then sum them all up year by year and plot the total curve. For simplicity the individual wells are ramped up at the same rate and decline at a slightly greater rate. The reason the Total region looks like it does (sharp peak) is because the individual wells are staggered such that there is no flat spot (i.e. one well has gone through it's peak years as another is declining). You can recreate this in a spreadsheet exercise and get the same result. The Total curve is actual closer to a lognormal distribution according to my quick look in crystal ball. The total curve would become more log normal looking if all of the bigger wells were drilled in the early years. My experience is that there are many pools around the world where better wells were actually drilled later in the campaign.

[asg70]

http://patzek-lifeitself.blogspot.com/2 ... -what.html

I am really getting tired of this rhetorical approach perma-doomers use of linking exclusively to perma-doomer blogs and Zerohedge. This is NOT an effective appeal to authority. These are all heavily biased sources making extraordinary claims and not giving more mainstream experts a chance to challenge them.

Anyone can say anything they want in a blog and pump out bogus stats and create truthy sounding conclusions that fall apart like a house of cards under scrutiny. The problem is on the internet these blog posts sit unchallenged and people pick them like cherries because they reinforce someone's preexisting view of the world. Don, you could start your own blog anonymously and then link to your own blog but would you expect us to treat it as "news" or you as an expert just because it is presented in a news like way? Nobody seems to knows how to vet authoritative information anymore which is why we're the blind leading the blind.

This is what's happening here maybe 90% of the time when you see a URL pasted in a forum post. It's Zerohedge, Shadowstats, Gail's blog, Orlov, Greer, whatever. It's the perma-doomer echo-chamber and nothing more.

[ROCKMAN]

Doc - "My experience is that there are many pools around the world where better wells were actually drilled later in the campaign." Same problem I run into: folks see Onshore field discovered in 1946 that produced 150 million no and compare to the current average field discovered in the same trend that produces 100,000 bo. What they don't know/appreciate is that it took hundreds of wells to produce those 150 mm bo and just a handful to recover the 100k bo.

Likewise: in general the best onshore wells ever drilled can't match the per well recoveries of the Deep Water GOM today.

[AdamB]

@AdamB
If you prefer an explanation for what is wrong with oil and the world from a perspective very much like thermodynamics, you can see:

http://patzek-lifeitself.blogspot.com/2 ... -what.html

I am aware of Tad's peak oil credentials. Do you ever use references outside the core group of believers? Analysts, scientists, people who haven't decided to be believers first, and rationalize second?

'As excess energy obtained from oil production decreases, so does the maximum achievable rate of blood flow, and the societal metabolism slows down.'

From Tad Patzek, former head of Petroleum Engineering dept at U of Texas, and now working in Saudi Arabia.

Don Stewart

Are you aware of any of the background of references you use? Tad said the US couldn't offset other declines....in the middle of the fastest growing oil production in the history of the country, and got as caught out as any peaker.

https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2012/ ... professor/

Perhaps you didn't know he is among the CHIEF peak oilers?

http://peak-oil.org/new-board-members-b ... -aspo-usa/

[donstewart]

@Adam B
You will note that Tad is talking about 'net energy', not barrels of hydrocarbons produced. He is a smart man, and the distinction is not an accident. His language about the blood of civilization slowing down either IS a thermodynamic perspective or very similar to one.
Don Stewart

[donstewart]

@asg70
I imagine people would a lot rather read the opinion of an expert like Patzek than my opinion. I posted this because there are many people now writing here who maintain that counting barrels of hydrocarbons (some pretty useful hydrocarbons, some not very useful hydrocarbons) tells us what we need to know. Patzek provides a different perspective, and it's not a classical Hubbert curve perspective.
Don Stewart

[dirtyharry]

My take :
1 barrel of oil= 42 gallons what we get are
Gasoline 19 gall
Diesel 13 gall
ATF 4 gall
Rest 6 gall ( Naptha,Bitumen, etc)
The problem is that over the last 50 + years the trend in transportation has been from Gasoline to Diesel . Today in Europe about 65 % of the car park is diesel and it is + 55% in emerging markets like India ,China,Indonesia where the price differential is very high to subsidise the farmer and the trucking industry,but that is where the growth is of the car production (OECD is declining or flat) . Today except for North America there is less demand for gasoline which has to go in storage . This is compounded by the fact that shale oil of + 45 API which is as good as gasoline is also adding to the storage pressures . NYMEX is the place where oil is trading . The only good storage data is from North America the rest of the world the data is very sketchy . The traders apply the US storage and use this as a benchmark .In my opinion the storage in US is mainly gasoline + shale and this is pushing the crude oil storage to the margins . The refineries are in a Catch 22 situation . They must process crude but they cannot move the gasoline so they are CLOGGED . What will give ? I do not know .This is a situation " Darn if you do and darn if you don`t"

[ROCKMAN]

"They must process crude but they cannot move the gasoline so they are CLOGGED". Refineries ARE NOT obligated to buy oil and refine it. They only buy as much oil AT A PRICE of their choosing if they can project making a profit selling the products.

Gasoline in storage "clogging" the system? LMFAO! According to the EAI the US refineries have consistently reduced the amount of finished gasoline inventory by 85% over the last 15 years from 150 million bbl to 22 million bbls. In fact since the oil price collapse in 2014 the amount of finished gasoline in US storage gas has DECREASED 50% to the current level.

It never ceases to amaze me how folks will rattle of completely false narratives which are typically based on bullsh*t headlines tossed out by the MSM and armchair "experts" to lazy to do a 30 second web search. Here's the true profile of finished gasoline in US storage:

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafH ... FSTUS1&f=W

BTW guess why the inventory of finished gasoline has dropped so much since 2014...US consumption has increased 30% during that same period:

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafH ... 600001&f=m

I suppose we should renew the conversation about how many aspects of the global business dynamic has be switching to the "just in time" model and how that's inducing more instability into the system.

Just f*cking amazing. LOL.

BTW: "NYMEX is the place where oil is trading . " Physical oil is not traded on the NYMEX. Oil futures contracts are traded there. Physical oil trades are made between the refineries and the companies that buy oil from us producers. It usually happens in the big conference room. Or over lunch. LOL.

[dirtyharry]

RM . Tks for UNCLOGGING . It is appreciated .

[AdamB]

@Adam B
You will note that Tad is talking about 'net energy', not barrels of hydrocarbons produced.

Here is the entire paragraph. He isn't spouting off about net energy at all.

Gasoline prices could suddenly spike even higher, and though increases in U.S. domestic supply may be important, no realistic U.S. increase will offset declining yields from other nations, according to Professor Tadeusz Patzek, chair of the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and Vice-President of the ASPO-USA Board of Directors. He highlights that declining output from most oil-exporting nations over the past decade, in the face of rising global demand, is likely to create a lasting drop-off in global availability of oil-spelling serious consequences for all oil-importing nations, including the United States.

Just his usual, and expected, peaker stuff.

Like I mentioned before, did you even know he was a certified zealot, prior to pretending he was an honest source of information?

He is a smart man, and the distinction is not an accident.

He is a smart man. So are all the people who didn't fall for what he has been selling, the difference being they appear to understand the dynamics well enough to have not fallen for what he was selling. And his intelligence doesn't change a perspective based on zealotry any more than facts, reality, and history did Colin Campbell's. He was a smart guy as well.

His language about the blood of civilization slowing down either IS a thermodynamic perspective or very similar to one.
Don Stewart

His language getting prices and volumes wrong indicates we should bin him in the group that allows his advocacy to get in the way of his intelligence.

[donstewart]

AdamB
Where did you get the quote about Tad? Not from my post. Here is what he said in this post:

'As excess energy obtained from oil production decreases, so does the maximum achievable rate of blood flow, and the societal metabolism slows down.'

As metabolism slows down, then what happens to the price of oil is speculative, since we are pricing oil in fiat dollars. Those in charge of the fiat might be able to make it anything they want to make it. The important thing is the slow metabolism. Everybody gets worse off.

I was well aware of Tad's history before I linked to his comments. From Poland to Berkeley to Austin to Saudi. I also knew he was the head of ASPO for a while. What he says stands on its own. Only a fool would disregard it solely because of his ASPO membership.

Don Stewart

[AdamB]

AdamB
Where did you get the quote about Tad?

I quoted the non-promotional material, correct.

Not from my post. Here is what he said in this post:

'As excess energy obtained from oil production decreases, so does the maximum achievable rate of blood flow, and the societal metabolism slows down.'

So Tad's PhD isn't in petroleum something or another, but is medical in nature? My apologies, I quoted his words based on what I thought his academic training was in.

I was well aware of Tad's history before I linked to his comments.

So...knowing that he was just another peaker, you thought he brought some new insight to the table...because he has branched off into medical metaphors? I must ask, if you knew already that he had discredited his own prognostication abilities, why in the world would you believe his next set would be any better? Because he is due to get lucky...or because he continues to say things you want to believe, and regardless of his credibility, as long as says those things, he's your go-to guy for all things peak?

From Poland to Berkeley to Austin to Saudi.

And check out all the texas BEG work on the US shales, and let us know how his vast experience was applied to those results and then maybe you can tell us you knew that as well, and can explain why they didn't do energy metrics rather than oil or gas volumes? After all, he is quite quite well traveled.

I also knew he was the head of ASPO for a while.
What he says stands on its own. Only a fool would disregard it solely because of his ASPO membership.

Don Stewart

You said you were aware of his past, which include his poor prognostication. Or did you only mean, you knew he was a peaker, and you didn't know he has been proclaiming the end for awhile now and...just...can't...seem...to get it right?

[coffeeguyzz]

I didn''t know that Patzek guy at all, except he was highly regarded by many for his work with BEG.
He put out a short piece on his blog about two years ago to the effect the Marcellus was heading downhill and the Utica was paltry stuff.
Piece was linked to a site I followed, so I commented directly to him asking some relavant, recent production facts.
He displayed near total ignorance about anything, yet vociferously defended his "running out real soon" position.
Curious how anyone could take him seriously.

[asg70]

Gasoline prices could suddenly spike even higher

Also sounds like good old fashioned supply/demand here, which contradicts ETP. With ETP, price can only go down.

I mean, has the discussion stooped so low that the appeals to authority are not just cherry-picked but we're expected to sort of selectively highlight and ignore individual phrases depending on whether the "expert" is reinforcing or contradicting the favored narrative?

It's like "look here! he's talking about net energy" and "oh, no, don't pay attention to him talking about prices going up".

This sort of linking is useless.

[donstewart]

@all you guys criticizing Patzek
It can be proven that a baseball player cannot physically catch a baseball unless their brain engages in very rapid and unconscious error detection and correction. So when you dredge up statements from the past, and then try to damn the person for having changed their mind or refined their position, you are only revealing your own ignorance about how humans survive in the world.

The baseball player's initial 'plan' for catching the ball is NEVER correct in all its details. Nor should you expect anyone studying the broader questions of oil and the economy to get everything right in their initial efforts.

If you were to go back far enough in my history you might undoubtedly find that I once bought into some sort of volume theory of Peak Oil. But, like the baseball player, I have observed and corrected. I believe, today, that the biological metaphors are better for understanding what is happening in the world than the notion of sucking all the soda out of the can with a straw. The ETP model also explicitly rejects the soda can analogy. Whatever I think and whatever the ETP model assumes do have that in common. But there is certainly no necessity that all the other details be the same.

You might also find some statement I once made which indicated that prices in US dollars have to fall. But for quite some time I have been ambivalent on the subject of nominal price. Anyone who has seen how the central banks have propped up the world financial system for the last decade has to be impressed by the power of money printing. Whether the money printing will come to a bad end remains to be seen. Whether the central banks can control the nominal price of oil, even as the energy value of the oil is declining, is NOT the central issue. The central issue is the slowing of societal metabolism.

If you guys want to write historical accounts of how people slowly figured out the centrality of slowing societal metabolism, then do so. But don't criticize people for error detection and correction.

Don Stewart

[vtsnowedin]

@all you guys criticizing Patzek.....
...... Whether the money printing will come to a bad end remains to be seen. Whether the central banks can control the nominal price of oil, even as the energy value of the oil is declining, is NOT the central issue. The central issue is the slowing of societal metabolism.

If you guys want to write historical accounts of how people slowly figured out the centrality of slowing societal metabolism, then do so. But don't criticize people for error detection and correction.

Don Stewart

I see a couple of errors there you might want to correct. First is the energy value of oil. It is going up not down. A gallon of gas will take your car today some thirty to fifty miles while the car of 1945 would only get 10 to 18 mpg. And the energy used to build the car was higher in 1945 just from the weight of steel in the vehicle and the efficiency of the mills that made that steel. Then you have the lifetime of the car which in 1945 was about 80,000 miles and today is often well past 200,000 miles. Throw in the safety of modern cars which saves medical bills and deaths and the energy value of the gas burned in a car today is soaring compared to what it once was.
Secondly is this gibberish about the "societal metabolism" . Perhaps the retirees down in the Villages in Florida are kicking back and slowing down along with the aging population of Japan and Europe but that is more then balanced out by the rising generations in China and India.

[donstewart]

@vtsnowedin
I gave Tad a comment about 48 hours ago telling him that I think he may have hit upon a useful metaphor. He hasn't printed the comment yet, so maybe he thinks it is too stupid to print or is so blindingly intelligent that he wants to pirate it for his own use...or maybe he is just busy and hasn't checked his blog.

If I could, I would just copy the comment and paste it here. But, instead, I will try to reconstruct it.

First up, the whole issue of thinking in analogies. Some people believe analogies are the ONLY way we can think. Barrett, in her book on Emotions, admits that the stories she will tell are not entirely consistent with all of the facts, but she is going to use them anyway because we have to start somewhere and analogies are the best place we know of to start. Robert Sapolsky, who contributed a blurb to the jacket of Barrett's book, says in his new book describing the best and the worst of human behavior, says he is adopting the old-fashioned 'triune brain' theory which Barrett rejects, even though he admits there are problems with it, because it greatly facilitates his storytelling.

So the straw in the soda can story was not entirely wrong, but it wasn't right enough to be very useful to us today. The thermodynamics story from physics is right enough to be useful to us today, but may not be the whole story. At George Mobus' blog, I posted this question almost 3 months ago:

'George
If your professional role permits it, I would appreciate your reaction to Nora Bateson's proposal to separate engineering complex systems from biological complex systems.

https://norabateson.wordpress.com/2015/ ... -progress/

Thanks....Don Stewart'

George said he is real busy in his new job at Springer, but would get back to me. He said he met Nora at a meeting in Europe. Maybe I will hear from George, and maybe not. At any rate, the question of whether mechanical analogies apply to biological systems is a serious one.

I turned the Nora Bateson question around and asked Tad if biological analogies may not be the best way to understand combinations of biology and physics, such as the economy.

At the heart of being human is the electron cascade. Our mitochondria, which is a captured microbe which has been shorn of most of its DNA and sequestered inside our cells, controls oxidation inside the cell. The electrical forces are acting over angstrom distances, and so are extremely powerful and dangerous. Many people think that dysregulation of the mitochondria, and thus of the electron cascade, is what getting old is all about...free radical damage.

We can make an analogy between the cell and the economy by observing that both involve carbon electrons. We can also make an analogy between the biological role played by the mitochondria and the role played by the economy or culture in human society. We can analogize that just as malfunctioning mitochondria result in death, a malfunctioning economy or culture may result in the collapse of the particular culture...in our case, the industrial economy built on hydrocarbons.

If you look at the things which can go wrong in a human, the list suggests things which can go wrong in an economy or culture. For example, the wear and tear on the cells as trillions of powerful electrons have cascaded through it might be thought of as analogous to John Michael Greer's notion of catabolic collapse. The build-up of pollution might be thought of as analogous to the lesions which block arteries. The inventiveness and innovation of humans might be thought of as analogous to the Default Network which (subconsciously) considers and selects from a wide variety of possibilities.

Let me digress a little on the Default Network. A few years ago I heard a health psychologist speak despairingly of the Default Network. It was just evidence that the mind was confused and unfocused. But in the last decade or so we have come to realize the central importance of the Default Network...the constant bubbling up of possibilities. As a footnote, the Rumination Cycle, where we continually ruminate about some slight we received or some piece of bad luck is still seen as a really destructive thing, but we now separate it from the Default. The word Default would likely never have been used if the people making the discoveries had understood its importance.

So where does that leave us? We are still not sure what to do with complex systems. Some people (Dmitry Orlov, for example) say flatly that humans cannot control complex systems and so just accept that they are going to turn out however they turn out and you as an individual will just have to deal with it. Other people like Nora Bateson thinks humans, individually and as a group, do have influence on complex systems. On good days I side with Nora, on bad days with Dmitry.

If we are able to imagine a complex system involving both the physics of producing work using hydrocarbons in a complex economy and culture which are behaving in response to many forces not very well described by physics, then can we make useful predictions about it? If we compare the efficiency of the electron cascade inside a cell with the efficiency of turning crude oil in the ground into movement across the landscape in a car or truck, it is like day and night. The cell is very efficient, while the human organized work is very inefficient. So that is observation #1. But observation #2 is that, since the current way of doing things is so inefficient, there is a lot of opportunity for improvement. Observation #3 is that the most sophisticated energy system we know, the cell, is still absolutely dependent on physics. Mitochondria do not 'make' energy'.

While we are waiting for some Isaac Newton or the founders of Quantum Physics to put all this into some Theory of Everything, my conclusion is that the ETP model is the best insight we have. It is certainly not perfect. But it does look at both the physics of hydrocarbon production as well as the economic production enabled by the hydrocarbon products.

A few days ago I posted some charts showing the makeup of several samples of conventional oil and also of light-tight oil. My conclusion from looking at the charts was that the light-tight oils were not producing the same percentage of useful transportation fuels as the conventional fields. Nobody challenged my conclusion. If my conclusion is correct, then Tad Patzek is also correct that, per barrel processed, we are experiencing an erosion of ability to do work. Which may be an important factor in explaining the explosion of debt around the world. Which debt may come back to haunt us in the form of another round of financial collapse.

While you like to claim that a barrel is a barrel, it is easy to mix up gallons of diesel or gasoline produced with the question of how many gallons of input had to be processed to get the output. Physics limitations arise mostly because of the processing, much as overburden in a surface mining operation is a serious limitation.

Don Stewart

[asg70]

If you guys want to write historical accounts of how people slowly figured out the centrality of slowing societal metabolism, then do so. But don't criticize people for error detection and correction.

What you are describing is the scientific method. You always have to be open to the idea that your model is wrong. So don't get too settled on ETP to the point of epistemic closure.

[vtsnowedin]

@vtsnowedin


Let me digress....

You certainly did.

A few days ago I posted some charts showing the makeup of several samples of conventional oil and also of light-tight oil. My conclusion from looking at the charts was that the light-tight oils were not producing the same percentage of useful transportation fuels as the conventional fields.

If that were true the totals of finished gasoline and diesel type fuels supplied would be declining. They are not.

....
........
While you like to claim that a barrel is a barrel, it is easy to mix up gallons of diesel or gasoline produced with the question of how many gallons of input had to be processed to get the output.

Don Stewart

It is clear that it still takes just a gallon in for each gallon out in spite of Shortonoil's constantly repeated lies about refinery consumption.
That may change when the percentage of tar sands dilbit being processed rises to a point it can't be balanced by light oil and condensate but that is a decade or more away.