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235 comments on DrumBeat: September 2, 2006

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Asebius on September 2, 2006 - 10:56am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Do we have an example of HL correctly predicting the peak when the production graph is quite erratic?

Lower 48 and North Sea seem like ideal cases.

Looking at some of Stuart's work, I'm less certain about HL in the ME.

http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/7/7/13359/29714
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/1/20/193723/259

It is clear that when most of the oil produced is destined for export to distant nations, production tends to follow erratic patterns.  i.e.  It is much more susceptible to factors other than the one that gives HL its theoretical underpinnings: production is mostly affected by remaining URR. (the number of fish left in the pond determines your catch today -- to use Deffeyes analogy).

If HL misses the ME peak by a decade or more, it will be judged to have been a sloppy tool since, on the time scale of the oil age, a decade is a significant chunk of time.

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westexas on September 2, 2006 - 11:10am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"If HL misses the ME peak by a decade or more. . ."

Of course, as we predicted, Saudi oil production is declining, and the Stuart's HL plot of Kuwait fits the new lower estimate of URR.

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Asebius on September 2, 2006 - 11:38am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

It should be obvious that in the linearization, taking a great big leaping extrapolation off that little linear area has got to be a rough approximation at best. Stability analysis confirms that. Probably the linearization estimate of URR is only good to a factor of 2 or so (with probably a larger error bar on the downside than the upside). K is maybe uncertain by 50%.

That's from Stuart's article on Kuwait.  A factor of 2 is a very big deal.  i.e. URR could be twice as big as HL predicts.

I'm not arguing against your conclusions since I don't have an alternate model.  Just pointing out that there is evidence HL is considerably less predictive in the ME.

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westexas on September 2, 2006 - 12:51pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"Just pointing out that there is evidence HL is considerably less predictive in the ME."

Actually, the evidence, the decline in production since December by the top exporters, especially Saudi Arabia, supports HL method.  Stuart is expressing an opinion that the method has errors (depending on where a region is along the linear plot), but the evidence, e.g., the US, Texas, Russia, North Sea and now the world and Saudi Arabia support the accuracy of the method, especially at or beyond 50% of Qt.

The key point is that the world and Saudi Arabia have shown strong linearization patterns for quite a while--which makes the predictions much more accurate.  Both regions are at or past the 50% of Qt mark.  The HL method was 99% accurate in predicting post-1970 Lower 48 cumulative production, using only production data through 1970 to predict future production.

I would go back to my example of the Lower 48 versus the North Sea.  The two producing regions could not be more different, but they peaked at the same stage of depletion.  We find the big fields first--that is why we can compare the Lower 48 to the North Sea to the Middle East and ultimately to the world.

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235 comments on DrumBeat: September 2, 2006

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