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.