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PeakOil is You

A personal overview of the peak oil theory

General discussions of the systemic, societal and civilisational effects of depletion.

Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby AdamB » Tue 26 Nov 2019, 20:52:45

rockdoc123 wrote:
That does't make the concept of peak oil a religion or Hubbert a phony prophet like Harold Camping. It just means he did the science wrong.


No, he did not. He was working within the data universe that was available at the time. When Hubbert constructed his analysis mid-twentieth century there was really no view that oil could be extracted from tight reservoirs and especially shales with any large success.


Oh, I can't agree with that one Rock. Hubbert knew about hydraulic fracturing in 1956 when he wrote the wrote rock mechanics paper you and I are familiar with. In the late 1920's or so the largest known accumulation of natural gas in the world was the Devonian shale of the Big Sandy Gas field. "Large success" being a relative term of course, but way back when, no one was discounting Big Sandy. The Atlas of Major Appalachian Basin Gas Plays lists tight and shale development between 1860 and 1880 that was still producing upon the Atlas's publication. Hubbert would have known all of that, maybe not intimately, but you can't say that there was no view, as these things were already historical in nature.

rockdoc123 wrote:The Antrim shale which was the only tight siliceous reservoir of any significance at the time did not have well rates that were of any interest.


Except for the Devonian that had already boomed...TWICE in Ohio..once BEFORE wire rope was introduced to the oil field. Were you ever involved with anyone during the Eastern Regional Gas Shales Project? You get to learn all this cool history stuff when you get into DOE research projects like that. Some of those USGS folks I kept in touch with through their retirement, decades later.

rockdoc123 wrote:
Working within his limits Hubbert was bang on.


The problem were those limits, but I'll give you that it wasn't until later in the 60's and early 70's that he began to recognize them himself, stopped publication of a paper once until he could better account for what I now call "known unknowns". I spoke to his last boss at the USGS about him a few years ago at AAPG, plus Lawrence Drew wrote some of it up in his book. You can get cool stories from the USGS folks about Hubbert, although admittedly that was decades ago now, they have retired since.

rockdoc123 wrote:Remember he was looking at Reserves, not Resources which meant it didn't matter how much oil might be in place in shales and very tight rocks across the US it mattered if they would be recoverable and Hubbert had to use the knowledge of what would be recoverable at the time.


In his 1956 paper, he was certainly looking at resources. Any interpretation of the differences between reserves and resources puts his "future discoveries" estimates in his famous Figure 21 graph of Nuclear Energy and Fossil Fuels paper firmly in the resource category.
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Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby Plantagenet » Tue 26 Nov 2019, 21:10:10



Good to see. The EIA has a mixed record predicting global hydrocarbon trends.....they've been almost as bad at predicting oil production as Harold Camping has been at predicting the rapture in some years. Hopefully the scientists of the EIA will do better when they get this new model up and running.

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Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby ralfy » Tue 26 Nov 2019, 22:59:47

The problem isn't what happens when production peaks but when there is not enough cheap oil to cover demand. That's what we've been seeing the past decade or so.
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Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby AdamB » Tue 26 Nov 2019, 23:14:35

ralfy wrote:The problem isn't what happens when production peaks but when there is not enough cheap oil to cover demand.


With decreasing demand, and oil less than half of what it was at its peak in 2008, there doesn't appear to be any problem in our near or mid-future.

ralfy wrote: That's what we've been seeing the past decade or so.


We've been seeing increasing demand, and even faster production growth, since the claimed peak on Thanksgiving Day, 2005. 14th anniversary of that peak oil claim rapidly approaching! And we have had cheaper oil SINCE 2008 (11 years), so no, we haven't seen "not enough" at all.

As of late, glut is on the horizon in a BIG way. The problem you speak of ralfy doesn't look to be on the horizon anytime soon.
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Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby rockdoc123 » Tue 26 Nov 2019, 23:26:02

Oh, I can't agree with that one Rock. Hubbert knew about hydraulic fracturing in 1956 when he wrote the wrote rock mechanics paper you and I are familiar with. In the late 1920's or so the largest known accumulation of natural gas in the world was the Devonian shale of the Big Sandy Gas field. "Large success" being a relative term of course, but way back when, no one was discounting Big Sandy. The Atlas of Major Appalachian Basin Gas Plays lists tight and shale development between 1860 and 1880 that was still producing upon the Atlas's publication. Hubbert would have known all of that, maybe not intimately, but you can't say that there was no view, as these things were already historical in nature.


Its not the same thing. He knew fractures could be created through pore fluid pressure increases but had no idea that fracking and especially in long horizontal wells would ever work. In the fifties when Hubbert was doing this work a horizontal well was a few metres in length and there were very few of them. Fracking was used in vertical wells to clean up damage in the sixties but not when he did his work. So it is a whole different ball game. The shales you list are the same as the Antrim shale, it produced for decades but at extremely low rates and there was no indication that the scale required to make large volume production on the scale we now see would ever be possible. Hell back in the late nineties none of us working extensively in the business across all areas would ever have thought it possible to get production from tight reservoirs to the extent it is let alone at the cost.

Except for the Devonian that had already boomed...TWICE in Ohio..once BEFORE wire rope was introduced to the oil field. Were you ever involved with anyone during the Eastern Regional Gas Shales Project? You get to learn all this cool history stuff when you get into DOE research projects like that. Some of those USGS folks I kept in touch with through their retirement, decades later.


But low rate rapidly depleting reserves and in gas not oil which was what Hubbert was looking at in the fifties that is referenced by everyone in terms of Peak Oil (not Peak gas). Hence why it wasn’t considered as being of economical significance. Adding one more of that or subtracting it from Hubberts analysis wouldn’t have made much difference given the high rates of oil experienced in the conventional reservoirs at that time.

In his 1956 paper, he was certainly looking at resources. Any interpretation of the differences between reserves and resources puts his "future discoveries" estimates in his famous Figure 21 graph of Nuclear Energy and Fossil Fuels paper firmly in the resource category.


Fair enough but still he was working in the confines of what was thought to be economically possible at the time..i.e. onshore and shallow water offshore, vertical wells, conventional reservoirs. By resources I should have been more specific in that I was meaning the large resource that we always knew was in place in the basin centers within source rocks and tighter reservoir units which was not considered by Hubbert and reasonably so at the time.
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Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby AdamB » Wed 27 Nov 2019, 00:46:54

rockdoc123 wrote: He knew fractures could be created through pore fluid pressure increases but had no idea that fracking and especially in long horizontal wells would ever work.


Well sure, I wasn't claiming he could see an exact future any better than anyone else. But he knew what hydraulic fracturing was. He knew what horizontal wells were. He knew that shale gas was viable. Did he know EXACTLY the future? No. But those "known unknowns", he began to figure it out later.

rockdoc123 wrote: In the fifties when Hubbert was doing this work a horizontal well was a few metres in length and there were very few of them.


Well, I don't know how many of them there were by the 1950's, only that anyone with Hubbert's familiarity with the industry couldn't claim they weren't possible, innovative and potentially useful in the future I'll bet. Same issue with hydraulic fracturing at the same time, although I'll grant you it was far more established by that time.

rockdoc123 wrote:Fracking was used in vertical wells to clean up damage in the sixties but not when he did his work. So it is a whole different ball game.


So those 100,000 frack jobs he was talking about by 1956, those were just for skin damage? I can't find a reference anywhere that the modern completion technique was just a skin damage cleanup back then. Do you happen to have a reference?

rockdoc123 wrote:The shales you list are the same as the Antrim shale, it produced for decades but at extremely low rates and there was no indication that the scale required to make large volume production on the scale we now see would ever be possible.


"no indication" is always what the folks who didn't figure it out first say. "Gee...who coulda known!!". But of course you can begin to think about the known unknowns...by the time Lawrence Drew was writing about Hubbert at the USGS and reserve growth, he was thinking EXACTLY that, and how to compensate for it.

rockdoc123 wrote:Hell back in the late nineties none of us working extensively in the business across all areas would ever have thought it possible to get production from tight reservoirs to the extent it is let alone at the cost.


I was doing multi-stage slickwater fracturing in vertical wells, in the Devonian shale, as various times in the 80's and again later in the 90's, making money at $20/bbl and $2/mcf. It wasn't anywhere near the kind of rates going on today, but making money was the name of the game, and that I could do. My costs were obviously quite low back in that low price environment, but you might not have thought it was possible, some of us were already doing it. Didn't think much of it at the time honestly. The people I was working with had been doing it since the mid-1970's, it was just the working oilfield in Appalachia.

rockdoc123 wrote:
Except for the Devonian that had already boomed...TWICE in Ohio..once BEFORE wire rope was introduced to the oil field. Were you ever involved with anyone during the Eastern Regional Gas Shales Project? You get to learn all this cool history stuff when you get into DOE research projects like that. Some of those USGS folks I kept in touch with through their retirement, decades later.


But low rate rapidly depleting reserves and in gas not oil which was what Hubbert was looking at in the fifties that is referenced by everyone in terms of Peak Oil (not Peak gas).


Hubbert provided peak gas estimates, as well as oil. And back then, a low rate was quite true, rapidly depleting was not. I use state data to track wells I operated that were drilled and completed in the shales in the late 1970's with declines <2%/annum. Still producing today. That was before everyone began compressing the frack stage density to the point where they front loaded all the production of course.

No experience with the Eastern Gas Shales Project though?

rockdoc123 wrote:
Hence why it wasn’t considered as being of economical significance.


Hubbert wasn't an economist, and didn't appear to play one in his publications. If there is one thing the engineers and geoscientists seem to lack, it is an appreciation for the 3rd required science to make estimates of what will happen in the future.

rockdoc123 wrote:
In his 1956 paper, he was certainly looking at resources. Any interpretation of the differences between reserves and resources puts his "future discoveries" estimates in his famous Figure 21 graph of Nuclear Energy and Fossil Fuels paper firmly in the resource category.


Fair enough but still he was working in the confines of what was thought to be economically possible at the time..i.e. onshore and shallow water offshore, vertical wells, conventional reservoirs.


Do you know of ANY reference in Hubbert's 1956 seminal work that referenced a dependency on cost, or price? I haven't been through it word for word in a while, but when I did that before, nothing related to economics stood out. This is quite important, because not accounting for basic economic premises is one of the reasons why run of the mill Happy McPeaksters screwed the pooch so badly 15 years ago. IMHO of course.
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Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby rockdoc123 » Wed 27 Nov 2019, 16:36:55

So those 100,000 frack jobs he was talking about by 1956, those were just for skin damage? I can't find a reference anywhere that the modern completion technique was just a skin damage cleanup back then. Do you happen to have a reference?


I can’t say for sure but I do know that in the seventies all of the frack jobs we did in wells were to clean up damage or near borehole effects. It wasn’t until the late eighties that Canadian Hunter lead the charge into the deep basin tight gas play were permeabilities were down in the 10 md range and siltstones required deliberate fracking with propant to produce gas. This is still a far cry from what was required to make the oil story out of the shales work. There permeabilities are in the nanodarcy range, when we talk horizontal wells there the lateral reach started out in the km range with single stage propped fracks and is now up north of 10 km with multi-stage (as many as 20 I think now) using slick water, ceramic sands and all sorts of tech not imagined back in the fifties. The difference between the vertical fracks conducted in the Austin Chalk back in the late eighties with the horizontal fracks now commonplace in the Permian is like comparing an Edsel to the Space Shuttle.

No experience with the Eastern Gas Shales Project though?


Not per say, although the company I was with was groundbreaking in developing the Marcellus shale for gas back in 2006 onwards. At that time it was a battle with costs to make it profitable.

Hubbert provided peak gas estimates, as well as oil. 


Yes but that hasn’t been the focus of the Peak Oil story. There it was all about Hubberts analysis of oil reserves and the tweaks made after by other workers such as LaHerre. Gas was a different story due to the relative permeability boost it has over oil with tighter reservoirs able to flow at high rates which wouldn’t happen with oil.

Hubbert wasn't an economist, and didn't appear to play one in his publications. If there is one thing the engineers and geoscientists seem to lack, it is an appreciation for the 3rd required science to make estimates of what will happen in the future.


Although at the time the definitions for Reserves didn’t include an element of economics it did actually take that into account by default as they only considered that which they figured they could develop and make money on. Remember back then oil prices had been sitting in the thirty to forty dollar range for nearly 50 years and everyone just assumed that would be the case going forward given the discoveries being made around the world. If anyone had contemplated $100 oil the analysis of future reserves might have been different.
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Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby asg70 » Wed 27 Nov 2019, 16:38:45

GHung wrote:
asg70 wrote: ........ In the meantime, those who seek to discredit any and all concern over oil supplies can just conveniently trash Hubbert's model......

.... after they've assigned a bunch of strawmen and false claims to what Hubbert was actually attempting.


When it was advantageous to do so, people exploited Hubbert's rep as an appeal to authority for their doomerism with no regard for what he was actually attempting. It was only after 2008 did some people try to salvage his posthumous reputation by separating out what he was attempting from what doomers were attempting.

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Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby AdamB » Wed 27 Nov 2019, 18:00:57

rockdoc123 wrote:
So those 100,000 frack jobs he was talking about by 1956, those were just for skin damage? I can't find a reference anywhere that the modern completion technique was just a skin damage cleanup back then. Do you happen to have a reference?


I can’t say for sure but I do know that in the seventies all of the frack jobs we did in wells were to clean up damage or near borehole effects. It wasn’t until the late eighties that Canadian Hunter lead the charge into the deep basin tight gas play were permeabilities were down in the 10 md range and siltstones required deliberate fracking with propant to produce gas.


Devonian shale, Devonian shale stringers, and some shallow sands like the Berea were going on in Ohio in the 1970's. Primary completions. I don't believe I've ever purchased, collected out of bankruptcy, recompleted in a different zone or worked over any well that hadn't been hydro fracked. The more I think of it, that can't be completely true, as CO2 and nitrogen, maybe foamed, were often used in the hot zones in the Devonian, with slickwater being for the named stringers or anything that didn't look as productive in the hot shale zone. Never even heard back then who else was doing it, I was a greenhorn engineer and just doing what I was taught to do.

rockdoc123 wrote:
This is still a far cry from what was required to make the oil story out of the shales work.


Define "work". Was working fine as long as I did it, but I wasn't concerned about whether or not it was going to create Saudi America one day, all it had to do back then was make money.

rockdoc123 wrote:The difference between the vertical fracks conducted in the Austin Chalk back in the late eighties with the horizontal fracks now commonplace in the Permian is like comparing an Edsel to the Space Shuttle.


Sure. But the physics were there for orders of magnitude change in cross sectional for any engineer that wanted to calculate it. I often think Hubbert was more an engineer than a geologist of course. :-D

In either case, we are still talking about known unknowns. And when Edsel was around, rockets were already being launched into space. Are you seriously saying that there wasn't any imagination into the future? Or even worse, that a guy like Hubbert would be bereft of it?

rockdoc123 wrote:
Hubbert provided peak gas estimates, as well as oil. 


Yes but that hasn’t been the focus of the Peak Oil story.


I know, but it was in the paper, as were other non-renewable resources. From the McPeakster angle, I believe that selling oil doom was just easier, then anything related to peak natural gas. It was reasonable that McPeaksters would try and brand their doom using oil instead of gas.

rockdoc123 wrote:
Hubbert wasn't an economist, and didn't appear to play one in his publications. If there is one thing the engineers and geoscientists seem to lack, it is an appreciation for the 3rd required science to make estimates of what will happen in the future.


If anyone had contemplated $100 oil the analysis of future reserves might have been different.


Now this one I have personal experience with. Working with consulting companies in my early years I had direct access to Appalachian Basin reserve studies, done for everyone from investors to banks to people related to that previously mentioned Eastern gas shales project. $100/bbl oil wasn't just contemplated, it was built into the oil price cases in black and white. Those studies, prior to the gradual drift downward in oil prices 1980-1985, seemed to end up at $100 by default. 1975-1980 vintage reserve work, afterwards they dried up.

So sure, folks were contemplating $100/oil back into the mid-70's. Never paid much mind to it until my field career ended though. Just one of those datapoints you pick up along the way I suppose.
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Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Wed 27 Nov 2019, 18:52:49

ralfy wrote:The problem isn't what happens when production peaks but when there is not enough cheap oil to cover demand. That's what we've been seeing the past decade or so.

Um, overall, where are the shortages? The big price spikes?

Globally, production seems to be covering demand just fine, overall. (Hotspots and geopolitics as local issues, not withstanding, and that's not the fault of the oil industry).

How cheap does it have to be to be "cheap" enough in your book, given the relatively small part of budgets energy costs are for first worlders now vs. say, the 70's?

If anything, the doom patrol has been braying that oil is TOO cheap and that companies can't "afford" to produce it (and yet, where are the resulting systemic shortages)?

The doomers complain about it both ways (via cherry picking), but in reality, you can't have it both ways.

So how, in inflation adjusted terms, are crude oil prices such a problem in the last decade, as opposed, to say, prices since the first OPEC flare-up in the 70's, given that real oil prices have averaged close to $50 over time?

And let's not forget how vehicles are consistently getting more efficient over time, for those who have concerns about their fuel budget.

Are you talking about the 4 year spike from 2010 to 2014? If so, why not say THAT?

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40893

https://www.macrotrends.net/2516/wti-cr ... aily-chart

https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude- ... tory-chart

https://www.businessinsider.com/real-ad ... 861-2016-1
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby rockdoc123 » Wed 27 Nov 2019, 20:53:22

Are you seriously saying that there wasn't any imagination into the future? Or even worse, that a guy like Hubbert would be bereft of it?


If you look at the period over which he was predicting we aren’t talking about thoughts about flying cars. Hubbert in the fifties was looking at what the technology of the day could make possible. As a geologist his future casting was based on trapping mechanism that were not yet being used in petroleum exploration. At the time exploration was concentrating on structural traps and stratigraphic traps found by “accident” (eg; Pembina). Hubbert speculated that we would eventually be looking for hydrodynamic traps and traps formed in subsidiary structures (anticline noses rather than four way closures).
I think the best paper to explain Hubberts data base that he used in 1956 is

M. K. Hubbert, 1975. Hubbert estimates from 1956 to 1974 of US oil and gas. IN: Methods and Models for Assessing Energy Resources. First IIASA Conference on Energy Resources, May 20-21, pp 370-388

In this paper he indicates he just uses reserves and production data from the US. Remember that much of the thrust in his energy paper of 1956 that many seem to reference was directed at the potential for nuclear energy to supplant oil. The calculation of oil reserves in the US was a method by which he was pointing to a limited resource that would need to be replaced, nuclear being his suggestion at the time.

Now this one I have personal experience with. Working with consulting companies in my early years I had direct access to Appalachian Basin reserve studies, done for everyone from investors to banks to people related to that previously mentioned Eastern gas shales project. $100/bbl oil wasn't just contemplated, it was built into the oil price cases in black and white. Those studies, prior to the gradual drift downward in oil prices 1980-1985, seemed to end up at $100 by default. 1975-1980 vintage reserve work, afterwards they dried up.


You are talking about the seventies and later. In 1973 oil prices doubled to a value never seen before and by 1980 they had skyrocketed. That had changed everyone's view of what was possible with oil price. When Hubbert was doing his work nearly twenty years earlier there had never been an oil price spike, there was lots of oil available and no reason for anyone to surmise prices would jump out of the narrow range they had been in for fifty years. Having been around the patch in the early seventies I remember distinctly the changes that were rapidly occurring and how Sheik Yamani had a cadre of armed body guards surrounding him when he presented the keynote speech at a meeting of the AAPG/CSPG in Calgary. He was a sea change as I remember.
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Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby asg70 » Wed 27 Nov 2019, 22:26:03

The problem with Hubbert is not unlike the problem with Malthus. Neither knew the ways in which innovation would succeed in kicking the can down the road. But the fundamental warning of limits to growth remains valid.

I see the unconventional boom to Hubbert similar to things like the post-war green revolution to Malthus. Both events sort of swooped in and saved us when we were sitting on the precipice, and both have downsides and are unsustainable. In terms of the near future, it's BAU, but the ultimate day of reckoning is still creeping forward and our remaining kick-the-can options are few.

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Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby AdamB » Wed 27 Nov 2019, 22:42:13

rockdoc123 wrote:
Are you seriously saying that there wasn't any imagination into the future? Or even worse, that a guy like Hubbert would be bereft of it?


If you look at the period over which he was predicting we aren’t talking about thoughts about flying cars.


True. But there is no need for flying cars to be involved. What Hubbert did have in front of him were the component pieces that drive today's development, knew that they both came along since he was in industry (signaling change and improvement that had no requirement stopping), and no one I've ever talked to about him has ever said he was so unimaginative that he couldn't think out in the future. His use of undiscovered resources in his graphs demonstrate a rudimentary understanding of the future, at worst, and the information on his pulling scientific articles because he knew he had to account for a known unknown. In his present.

rockdoc123 wrote:Hubbert in the fifties was looking at what the technology of the day could make possible. As a geologist his future casting was based on trapping mechanism that were not yet being used in petroleum exploration. At the time exploration was concentrating on structural traps and stratigraphic traps found by “accident” (eg; Pembina). Hubbert speculated that we would eventually be looking for hydrodynamic traps and traps formed in subsidiary structures (anticline noses rather than four way closures).
I think the best paper to explain Hubberts data base that he used in 1956 is

M. K. Hubbert, 1975. Hubbert estimates from 1956 to 1974 of US oil and gas. IN: Methods and Models for Assessing Energy Resources. First IIASA Conference on Energy Resources, May 20-21, pp 370-388


And I think some of his best work, specifically operating in an unknown future, was :

Hubbert, M.K., 1967, Degree of advancement of petroleum exploration in United States: American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin, v. 51, no. 11, p. 2207–2227.

rockdoc123 wrote:
Now this one I have personal experience with. Working with consulting companies in my early years I had direct access to Appalachian Basin reserve studies, done for everyone from investors to banks to people related to that previously mentioned Eastern gas shales project. $100/bbl oil wasn't just contemplated, it was built into the oil price cases in black and white. Those studies, prior to the gradual drift downward in oil prices 1980-1985, seemed to end up at $100 by default. 1975-1980 vintage reserve work, afterwards they dried up.


You are talking about the seventies and later.


True. I interpreted your statement to be more expansive than the 1950's, I've got it now. So Hubbert was dealing with prices in 1956 in the middle of the big flat price plateau 1930-1970 or so, so I will grant you that if Hubbert were an uneducated man, it was POSSIBLE he would have thought things would stay the way they were forever. Doesn't strike me as reasonable, but I will stipulate for the sake the asking the next obvious question. Do you really think it is an honest extrapolation that people as smart as Hubbert in the timeframe of 1930-1970 were thinking that oil prices were never going to change?
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Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby rockdoc123 » Wed 27 Nov 2019, 22:48:44

Do you really think it is an honest extrapolation that people as smart as Hubbert in the timeframe of 1930-1970 were thinking that oil prices were never going to change?


when he presented his Energy paper in 1956 everyone in the audience was in complete disbelief according to one of my thesis supervisors who was at the meeting. His comment was that up until then nobody in the industry had thought much about the oil industry in the US having a limited lifespan. After seeing oil prices sitting in a tight band for fifty years, no spikes whatsoever and assuming things would just go as they have with regards to production why would anyone expect oil prices to rise rapidly. The very thought of an "oil weapon" that was employed in the seventies basically crossed nobodies mind, at least nobody who anyone listened to.
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Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby AdamB » Wed 27 Nov 2019, 23:12:48

asg70 wrote:I see the unconventional boom to Hubbert similar to things like the post-war green revolution to Malthus. Both events sort of swooped in and saved us when we were sitting on the precipice, and both have downsides and are unsustainable.


From my first post in this thread.

AdamB wrote:"Well, obviously they didn't know that this <fill in something now obvious> was going to take place."

The same excuse works perfectly, forever, until the broken clock analogy wins in the end.


A key part of the modern peak oil movement was to NOT recognize how true your statement was, as well as mine. And you are exactly correct, it isn't just McPeaksters that refuse to learn from the mistakes of others, or of the past.

In the case of McPeaksters I instantly assign it to their need to create a faith based system out of the idea, altruism run amuck, or just doomers looking for doom and oil is a good excuse. That may have been too harsh. Because this problem tends to arise in other arenas as well, the odds of it on purpose ignorance is lessened, and the odds of just plain old ignorance rise rapidly.

There are reasons why this topic was as much a hobby to Hubbert as anything else. There is a reason why his co-workers, some of whom I've had the pleasure to talk to, weren't publishing peak oil science articles supporting the idea when it circled back around this century.

And obviously there are those who truly are scientists, and give presentations on why Hubbert's ideas have most likely been outdated by world class geoscientists with new concepts. Of note, these concepts also happened under the noses of McPeaksters, and might seem to fit into the next generation of oil modeling that I have referred to previously.

While McPeaksters haven't yet learned from the past and really like those sand castles, the scientists sure can't be faulted for being that kind of blind.
Plant Thu 27 Jul 2023 "Personally I think the IEA is exactly right when they predict peak oil in the 2020s, especially because it matches my own predictions."

Plant Wed 11 Apr 2007 "I think Deffeyes might have nailed it, and we are just past the overall peak in oil production. (Thanksgiving 2005)"
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Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby AdamB » Wed 27 Nov 2019, 23:18:00

rockdoc123 wrote:
Do you really think it is an honest extrapolation that people as smart as Hubbert in the timeframe of 1930-1970 were thinking that oil prices were never going to change?


when he presented his Energy paper in 1956 everyone in the audience was in complete disbelief according to one of my thesis supervisors who was at the meeting.


I had heard that as well. Have you read Mason Inman's book on Hubbert? It is interesting, a bit heavy of peak oil lore, but one of the first I've ever read that correctly references Hubbert's 1950 US peak oil call, the one that McPeaksters ignore at all costs. I liked it mostly for the historical facts and figures, quotes and whatnot, rather than the author's glorification of the current peak oil that wasn't.

rockdoc123 wrote:His comment was that up until then nobody in the industry had thought much about the oil industry in the US having a limited lifespan.


I can believe it. I'm betting that in the American oilfield in 1956, there weren't many neo-Malthusians.

rockdoc123 wrote:After seeing oil prices sitting in a tight band for fifty years, no spikes whatsoever and assuming things would just go as they have with regards to production why would anyone expect oil prices to rise rapidly. The very thought of an "oil weapon" that was employed in the seventies basically crossed nobodies mind, at least nobody who anyone listened to.


But prices. Do you really think it is an honest extrapolation that people as smart as Hubbert in the timeframe of 1930-1970 were thinking that oil prices were never going to change?

This question isn't specific to oil people, as Hubbert's perspective was wider than just what industry insiders would think.
Plant Thu 27 Jul 2023 "Personally I think the IEA is exactly right when they predict peak oil in the 2020s, especially because it matches my own predictions."

Plant Wed 11 Apr 2007 "I think Deffeyes might have nailed it, and we are just past the overall peak in oil production. (Thanksgiving 2005)"
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Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby wildbourgman » Thu 28 Nov 2019, 09:40:29

I can't believe this debate continues in the same manner year after year. Peak Oil is obvious, the fact that I'm sitting on a deep water drillship in thousands of feet of water where we drill over 30,000 feet down for a resource when 26 years ago in the beginning of my career I sat in 100 feet of water drilling 14,000 feet down tells a lot. Also having this debate without discussing the affects of central banking on currency and commodity prices is futile.

Oil fields deplete that's a fact, its whether or not we deal with that depletion in the same manner we dealt with other depletions of fuel sources, wood, coal, whale oil, ETC, that's the big question mark.
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Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby asg70 » Thu 28 Nov 2019, 10:13:32

wildbourgman wrote:having this debate without discussing the affects of central banking on currency and commodity prices is futile.


The problem is doomers create too strong of a correlation / causation linkage between the two. This is done to compensate for the fact that BAU continues apace.

We've gone from "how to leach acorns and make flour" to trying to fan the flames of "muh debt-bomb" while we casually sit down to a fully stocked Thanksgiving dinner.

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BOLD PREDICTIONS
-Billions are on the verge of starvation as the lockdown continues. (yoshua, 5/20/20)

HALL OF SHAME:
-Short welched on a bet and should be shunned.
-Frequent-flyers should not cry crocodile-tears over climate-change.
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Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby Tanada » Thu 28 Nov 2019, 11:11:39

Adam wrote: After seeing oil prices sitting in a tight band for fifty years, no spikes whatsoever and assuming things would just go as they have with regards to production why would anyone expect oil prices to rise rapidly. The very thought of an "oil weapon" that was employed in the seventies basically crossed nobodies mind, at least nobody who anyone listened to.

But prices. Do you really think it is an honest extrapolation that people as smart as Hubbert in the timeframe of 1930-1970 were thinking that oil prices were never going to change?

This question isn't specific to oil people, as Hubbert's perspective was wider than just what industry insiders would think.


Actually that is the most believable part to me. Up until 1914 the USA had never experienced serious inflationary pressure for the entire history of settling this continent. Then after a decade of inflation the price of oil became extremely stable in modern terms. IOW in 1956 oil had reverted to its "normal" stability and a vanishingly small portion of the population understood this was an artificial situation created by supply controls put in place by the TRRC.
Last edited by Tanada on Thu 28 Nov 2019, 11:53:24, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: fixed broken quote
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Re: A personal overview of the peak oil theory

Unread postby diemos » Thu 28 Nov 2019, 11:27:52

AdamB wrote:While McPeaksters haven't yet learned from the past and really like those sand castles, the scientists sure can't be faulted for being that kind of blind.



And yet, the amount of fossil carbon in the ground is finite and will one day be used up.
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