The Oil Drum

It seems to me we could really use an "open-source" bottom-up model for future supply/depletion, or perhaps a set of models under different scenarios "pessimistic", "neutral", "optimistic" or whatever. Then we could track/update/improve it over time, and others could take the base data and build their own models to test some hypothesis. I'm thinking "open-source" in the sense of open-source software in which a group collaborates to share the work of maintaining something, and the data is licensed freely to the public. Usually open source software ends up at least as good as, and maybe better than, the expensive proprietary equivalents.

Such a model might be maintained in Excel? I think a tricky thing is a good data architecture. Eg, one wants to be able to do things like discover that some field has been delayed by six months and only have to change one number to recompute all the scenarios.