Khebab,

I'm a college student and while I am going into Calculus 3 next semester I find this stuff exceedingly difficult to understand, what books, classes or websites might I look at to better understand this statistical modeling. It's tricky :D

Thanks,
Crews

Khebab

In my opinion the original discoveries plus a small fraction of the reserve growth is probably a good estimate for the amount of easy to extract oil left.

Just eyeballing the graph to integrate I get.

About 1.7 trillion barrels total.
Original = 1 trillion.

Assume a 20% growth in reserves is easy oil.

1.7*.20 = 340

This gives about 1340 billion barrels of "easy oil".

Lets give this rough estimate a 10% error term or range and its
1206 - 1340.

Given we are I think close to 1100 GB extracted now.

Then we could be at about 80-90% depleted in "easy oil".

This simply little calculation should be enough to make you wonder if we are going to keep production close to the highest levels ever achieved for much longer. Even if you increase the easy oil levels its not hard to see that production rates will probably begin to fall off soon.

The fact that the easy vs hard concept predicts a peak at around 70-78% of total URR inline with WT 60% of URR peak prediction is interesting. The two different approaches are not giving hugely different answers. In fact in my opinion the logistic is telling us a lot about how much easy oil we have left. In fact this easy oil approach does not tell us a lot about peak itself just when decline is certain peak could have been back at 1000 which given a 1700 total is 60% of URR perfectly in line with the logistic.

What the easy oil approach says is that decline is probably certain by 70% of URR or 10% past what was probably peak production.

Time will tell of course but I don't hold high hopes for us getting the next 700GB or 1000GB or whatever number we claim to still have in reserves out of the ground at anywhere near the rate we extracted the first half.