The Ghawar comment was intended to indicate that I, along with many others, do not believe that a new oil field the size of Ghawar and capable of producing 6.0 M bpd or multiple queen fields will be found in the future.

And my comment was intended to indicate that the lack of appearance of new "ghawars" was definitely not a reason for the lack of future production bumps, as if that was the case being, then there would be no bumps in the 1990's and 2000's.

On one hand you are looking at oil sands, arctic oil, and Angola making huge increases to perhaps helping to make additional production bumps. On the other hand, you say almost everyone says we are near the peak. What is your position?

I look at the world, not at my crazy numbers and a way to correlate them nicely into a chart. I look at the world and see further bumps that would add to your final big bump in the future, so that the final curve would be the sum of those future bumps and that last bump of yours. It could even be another negative bumps, like those you've used.

I see then that these predictions are worth zero, they only indicate a good correlation in past summed curves. The only way this theory could be of any use would be if one could know if further bumps are possible and produced, and how much. THEN, one would HAVE to add those curves to the last one in blue in all of those charts.

You would by then have your own PREDICTION.

OTOH, I say we are almost or past the peak. That is obvious and doesn't come from this analysis, rather from many others that didn't depend on curve fitting (HL comes to mind), numerology or astrology.

First off lets consider the real world situation. Saudi Aramco claims 259.8 B barrels proven oil reserves at the end of 2005 on its website and describes its expansion plan of increasing production capacity to 12.5 Mb/d by 2009. Many TOD participants and others believe that that the KSA reserves are closer to 160 B barrels. Isn’t it amazing that this “numerology” gives two answers, one in the 160 B barrel range and the other in the 260 B barrel range, that reflect the current debate occurring in the real world.

Amazing indeed. But it is rather like watching the horoscope that says that it is about to rain, but then again it may not rain. How that kind of knowledge is worth anything is beyond me. I couldn't care if it was astrology or numerology, if it told me exactly what was going to happen RATHER than telling me exactly what I want to hear, then I would gladly accept it. But it doesn't.

STILL, it is only numerology. Period. Even stopped clocks give always too good answers (160 and 260?) everyday.

the numerology shows that KSA production would have to exceed 10.5 M b/d to 11.0 M b/d in the next 2 years.

...Which renders your theory, among many others moot. You are not considering many things, like politics, specific geological problems, human error, worldwide actions/reactions, wars, etc. You just plot the line and tell us "if x doesn't reach y in z time, then abracadabra". That's nonsensical analysis. Even if your numerology is somehow based on a much more fundamental phenomenon, you can only aspire to a certain curve fit that doesn't wipe out the noise. And this noise could falsely trace you to the final URR between 160 and 260. This means that even from two years now you can't tell final URR of KSA. You can only guess, or aspire to know.

You could eventually be very wrong.

You have looked at the KSA results and question the value of the two results. At the same time, you have chosen to ignore the accuracy of the Kuwait and BP results. The projection of a URR of 45B barrels for Kuwait is spot on with Dr. Nader Al-Awadhi statement that traditional methods would produce 45 billion barrels. The BP results, which show a range of 2460 B barrels to 2600 B barrels for world URR, are also in close agreement with the latest projections from Hart and Skrebowski on world URR of 2420 B barrels and the varying projections in the range 2500 B to 2600 B barrels in ASPO newsletters #73 to #80.

Which is to say that a newly created theory has achieved to bring on the same results that we've already known / suspected. Brilliant. That is not enough. Learn more of Scientific Method: that is not enough.

Are you addressing the use of analysis in general? Are you addressing the value of analysis that uses a number of logistic functions to model multi-peak production profiles, such as the use of loglets in the Fischer-Pry decomposition, which is a challenge for many curve fitting techniques? Are you addressing the use and ability of the “least squares method” to fit a number of logistic functions to model multi-peak production profiles?

I know nothing about Fischer-Pry. I am addressing to your charts and to this simple reasoning: you took all of your charts and fitted bell-shaped curves with "least squares method". Fine. You then, show us your bell curves, they are a lot. Then, you plot a final one, blue painted, which is always given as the final curve, the final bell shaped curve, and yet you don't give any reason for us to take that blue curve as the final curve of history in oil production, you took that from granted. That's what I question and what seems to me as the greatest flaw.

Because, you see, a great way to see if your theory has any predictive value, is if you do what I challenged you to do: wipe out years to your plots (in several different charts), trace back your curves, and let us see if your charts always tells the same story. I bet they don't, I bet they always tell a different URR, a different story and different bell curves.

I am not against "analysis in general", as I commended the spirit of it. I like what Hubbert made. But he made a different approach. He didn't use curve fitting to predict URR. He made the other way around. That's why I called this "numerology".