46 comments on The second quarter of the year is normally quiet
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
46 comments on The second quarter of the year is normally quiet
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Support The Oil Drum
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
TOD:Europe
- Peak Gold, Easier to Model than Peak Oil? - Part I
- Carbon Capture and Storage
- Oilwatch Monthly November 2009
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- International Energy Agency calls 'Peak' on OECD Oil Demand
- Australian Senate: Peak Oil motion defeated 31:6
- The Bullroarer - Friday 20th November 2009
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- Early Warning
- The Energy Blog
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
Peak Oil Primers
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
—Albert Einstein
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Nate Hagens, Gail the Actuary, Prof. Goose
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Heading Out, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Sam Foucher, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Campfire: Glenn, Jason Bradford
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.










GAIA Host Collective
Have you read and understood the methodology of the USGS report? That would probably be the best place to start.
I have looked at the USGS figures very closely, and no one as yet has produced any good evidence to show they are wrong. In countries where active efforts are being made to discover oil, the volumes being discovered are in line with USGS estimates. In general, the countries which are not performing up to USGS estimates are not discovering new oil because no one has been exploring for oil there. Iraq is the classic example. The USGS estimates that large volumes of undiscovered oil are present in Iraq, but the poor discovery record in Iraq doesn't prove that the oil is not there. No one is drilling because the country is at war.
To prove that the USGS estimates of undiscovered oil are wrong, you need to identify a country/province X satisfying TWO criteria:
1) Discoveries in X are substantially lower than the USGS estimates suggest
2) Actual efforts are being made in X to discover new oil.
So far, no one has met the challenge of identifying such a country.
The USGS has a evaluated its own track record, in a paper referenced here. The USGS procedure for estimating reserve growth has an excellent track record, and in fact has underestimated reserve growth thus far, as you can see in the paper.
If you're curious, there's lots more analysis of the USGS available here
One thing I have learned from TOD and other peak oil sites is that reserve numbers are not that important. Evidence - and common sense - shows that the most easily exploited reserves are developed first; what is left after them is only good for managing the tail, which of course is important as such, but does not help the fact that we are close to the peak.
I truly did intend to mention that I have not read the report(s) in question.
I certainly have encountered a lot of indications that the USGS projections fly in the face of actual widespread evidence, though.
Hopefully they're somewhat readable...