ROCK wrote:PO is the max amount of oil actually produced.
Which explains why you don't think the date of PO is particularly important. By that definition I don't either.
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I have to admit I've given in to economics.
This is a board primarily inhabited by environmentalists (and Armageddonists) and the idea that Mother Always Trumps Economics is recieved wisdom. I went along with that for quite a while. But the economics of oil extraction is not about thermodynamics or any other physical law that can be modeled, peak oil production is not even necessarily much about geology. PO is about humans and how much we love to drive, which amounts to something much more than some rational number.
While I still believe a date past which the cheap oil of which we have become accustom is less available is all important and things will fundamentally change after, I no longer think I'll necessarily ever know it to point to it on a calendar. Because it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with actual production or price, it could come at any level of price or production.
Which isn't to say geology doesn't matter, of course it matters. That there is some point at which, just as Hubbert said, given no "outside influences" oil production would naturally peak. But humans extracting oil
is the outside influence and there is no logic to it. We'll only know the Hubbert peak date after all the extraction is over.
If a person is looking for the idealized Hubbert peak globally they will be disappointed. My very first illustration of PO was after Laherrere's idea of shifting discovery forward 40 years. (
from Here):
"You can't pump it if you can't find it."
But the classic Full Hubbert was truncated way back by humans and their economics, first with the creation of OPEC to replace TRRC at the peak of US conventional. So what we'll see will more resemble this...
That's an oldie I just happened to have handy but it makes the point, the area under the curve is the geology part, how much is there. But the shape of the curve is a result of economics in all it's complexity—supply/demand, politics/fads, regulation/profit, etc. etc.
So when you overlap discoveries with production you see this instead:
The top of Hubbert's peak was chopped off by higher prices instigated by the peak in the US and the formation of OPEC. How much higher price reduces consumption determines how much lower the peak, longer the plateau and or steeper the decline and shorter the tail. The "Full Hubbert" is still there, they can model it in 50 years maybe.
I've decided thinking rigidly about a geological limit to an economic process is wrongheaded and the reason my guesses are off. There really isn't a practical limit to the production rate of oil since there is nothing "practical" about wanting to spend 100s and 1,000s of times the energy to drive a 7,000# 4x4 F-250 to the QuilSac for a six-pac instead of walking at a well to wheel efficiency of maybe 10%.
So, the theoretical Full Hubert peak might well have been in 2015, 2005 or even 2000. My gut feeling is it is past and we are in the land of illogic because production is still rising
but that's just opinion
.