For the most important question of our time, we find a failure to commit. The fear of not succeeding strikes again.

But no one thinks it is a Gaussian. Consider that this makes absolutely no sense from first principles. Gaussians extend symmetrically to the left and right of the peak. However, since oil was only discovered in the USA in 1859 and a few years before that worldwide, no way can you even begin to fit it to a Gaussian. That is, you can't fit to the tails before 1859, which is what the Gaussian expects.

A better, but not by much, approximation is to use a Log-Normal distribution, which forces a positive value (i.e. time) to go negative by taking the logarithm of the number.

But in general, the Central Limit Theorem rarely works for a stochastic time series, which is what the oil discovery profile is.

We'll gee, I bet you're a load of fun at parties. Cut me some slack here, this is my first attempt at doing modeling of any significant complexity. I understand your point, but I'm not there yet and if no one else has done it then I'd guess that you're not there yet either. To be perfectly honest, I am exceeeding the expectations of my current undergrad class with this project. I've also managed to get the other members of my project team thinking along these lines where they were completely oblivious to this problem before. I also have a chance to present this to the remainder of my class and I may make a few of them aware too. I consider that a significant (albeit humble) contribution to awareness.

So in summary.

Hey, Im just wondering has anyone got any links to artciles or sites from around the time when Hubbert made his USA prediction to critics views on his predcition etc. Just tryin to find sum references that are in context and see who actual was against it etc. Any help would be appreciated

I would go to the library and try to find out what industry magazines were published in the Oil and Gas Business and search for anything that was published shortly after the above presentation. I would imagine that a year or two after the presentation the subject would have gone off into oblivion.

thanx for the reply, any idea when the statement was made that hubbert was actuallt right! when did the oil inudstry sate that production pekaed in 1970???

Here I wouldn't be able to tell you much as I always had my head in industry literature about technology. Equations and such

Take a look at dieoff.org. There's a lot mentioned there and was the first site that I found that started me off on the subject of PO.

I read Hubbard's stuff earlier but to be honest it did not ring an alarm loudly in my ear. The same was for my industry friends. I can honestly say that this was never discussed extensively by anyone I worked with until about 2002-2003 !!!! I mentioned PO to some friends in 2001 but the discussion died off very quickly. About 5 minutes of discussion and then we went off to do our every day engineering stuff.

If you listen to AM radio, you're familiar with the program MMMMMMMoneytalk. They're on AM-810 where I am right now, and they're about to discuss Hubbert's Peak. Cool

OK they're about to start, they'll have Kenneth Deffeyes (pronouncing it deff-AYS) on, talking about his book, "Hubbert's Peak".

mp3's of this MMMMMmmmoneytalk program should be available, so it might be one to find and put in with the audios offered on this site.

Any chance of a summary...and, perhaps, a link to the mp3?

It sounds interesting, but I'm not going to be able to listen today.

Thanks, Jack.

AM wow!!! that would be great, oh no wait, that isn't NBC red and this isn't 1933 when AM radio was still valid. If you get a chance tell David Sarnoff about this, perhaps he can do an op-ed

Geeze, ok SSB is a much more effecient mode, but AM radio is where the talk is, it's also easiest to build an AM transmitter and receiver.

Just look up Bob Brinker and Moneytalk, you should be able to find it.

A short video of an older King Hubbert explaining peak oil. Wonderful!

http://www.energybulletin.net/26976.html

Didn't know something like this existed. Thanks!