How about this?

(the html style manual has changed recently, and I'm sort of a technopeasant...)

Memmel

of course oil companies aren't immune. Chevron bought Texaco about 5 years ago, who is trying to sell their bonds? I think old bonds like that would be as gilt-edged as they get.

But you're getting awfully far ahead of the curve on Artic Ocean exploration. The countries surrounding the ocean own claims out to 200 miles offshore, and are just now trying to figure out who owns the rest. I don't care if there are 10 Ghawars out there, the production problems out there are likely to be as big as sending a rocket to Titan to send back methane, and just as likely to make money. Maybe our greatgrandchildren will have some oil after all.
Bob Ebersole

Stuart did not say that he expects a low decline rate. He said that HL suggests a low decline rate. I've seen Stuart in the past mention decline rates from near 0% to as high as 11% in order to examine different cases but I am not sure that I recall Stuart ever "endorsing" a particular decline rate as the most likely one. I do recall Stuart doing some work on what the maximum decline rate would be that the western world could likely adapt to without serious impact. I think he mentioned something like 7% or 8% as an upper bound? (I can't recall for sure as he's written very much here over the last 2.5 years, almost all of it very educational.)

Jeffrey, I know that you favor the HL method for predicting URR but I must remind you that Hubbert himself never ever did any such thing. Deffeyes did this and while Professor Deffeyes is a very intelligent man, I do not think he is of the same caliber as Dr. Hubbert. Specifically, if you read Hubbert's own 1956 paper, all of it, you see that he began with a priori URR estimates. Given these upper and lower bound estimates, he was able to then develop his math to fit his curves into those upper and lower bounds. Once this was done, the forecast for peak date was easily derived. Professor Deffeyes math does not predict a single URR with special accuracy. It assumes that IF a field is produced at maximum production then the URR can be bracketed by the subsequent URR estimates from that math. However, if the field is produced in another manner (as KSA has been), then the line derived from HL becomes fraught with potentially bad assumptions.

Further, note that Hubbert's upper bound forecast ended up being too conservative as we're over 200 GB and still climbing though the end appears to be in sight. Hubbert's going to end up being about 10%-15% too pessimistic even in his most optimistic case. What is interesting there is that this was for the US, which operated under very different conditions than the rest of the world. Inflation of oil figures such as we have seen in the Middle East could not occur in the US and instead we probably had understatement due to SEC rules necessitating that the oil companies be conservative. Note that in forcing this conservative view that the US ends up being in that 10%-15% too pessimistic category.

But then consider the Middle East, where reserves appear to be overstated by 40%-50% in many cases. Clearly the reserves numbers from the Middle East cannot be taken to be as reliable as the US reserve numbers. The force of the SEC's monitoring (not the free market) caused our reserve estimates to dovetail pretty closely to reality. Since no such force is causing the NOC's to moderate their wildly speculative reserve statements in the Middle East, the question becomes exactly how much are they overstated?

And this question is important. The answer to that question, since the Middle East holds a disproportionate amount of the world's oil, will be one of the key drivers of decline.

In my opinion, no one here at TOD has realistically looked at the Middle East as a whole and assessed what the decline rate is going to look like if the 1980s reserve inflations were as badly overstated as they appear. Stuart has hinted at it. Dave Cohen has hinted at it. But no one here seems to want to tackle that very urgent question. And it is indeed urgent. It we are at or within a few years of peak production, the decline rate is very dependent on many unanswered questions. Here's another one that I have never seen discussed by peak oilers - what proof do you have that the production curve for the world must be roughly symmetrical in nature? In other words, people are assuming that the production curve looks like the black curve below but what if it is really like the red curve? Which of you can prove that the red curve is false, especially in light of the wildly inflated reserve numbers from the Middle East, the ever receding "big" fields of Kazakhstan, the overstated "finds" of Jack 2 and China's offshore, both of which have been subsequently amended downwards, etc.?

If I plug the pre-NOC reserve estimates for Middle Eastern nations into a spreadsheet then apply identical reserve growth numbers to those estimates as occurred in the US, the situation is not very pretty.

In short, I think that the HL technique is an interesting additional tool for helping to confirm peak but it does not predict it as Hubbert's methods did. And given that, plus the massive change in global production pattern precipitated by the 1970s oil shock and the subsequent voracious growth, I am not at all sure that the red curve above is wrong. And further, I do endorse your notion of "exportland" because we are seeing it play out in fact right around us. I just question your URR estimates (and those of just about everyone else on this site) because of the wildly inflated numbers from the Middle Eastern NOCs.

By the way, Jeffrey, this is not intended as a personal attack on you or anyone else here. I am simply expressing my reasons for disagreement and my concerns which appear to have never been adequately answered about global production versus actual (versus inflated) reserves. I greatly respect the messages you have been trying to convey because I believe you are spot on about exports and the severity of the crisis facing western civilization (and by extension, the entire world).

P.S. I am going to remind everyone here that in early to mid 2005 we were being assured that by late 2007 we would see huge growth in production because the the mega-projects. This has not occurred and instead global production is down! How many of you that were predicting a 2010 or later peak have amended your forecasts based upon the changes of the last two years? Or are you religiously clinging to an outdated belief because you think your ego is attached to it? Do you believe that the 2008 and 2009 mega-projects will bring us all of what we were supposed to get in 2006 and 2007 plus what was projected for 2008 and 2009?

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone