Jabberwock,

Convincing people shouldn't be your goal.

Try to encourage people to think about small puzzle's, about the situation at hand. By doing this you are helping yourself to get a clearer look at the present day.
I also advise you to start thinking about how we have gotten into this mess. When you understand how we got here, it's much easier to explain.

History from the technical/energy point of view from 1700ad till 1900ad is so much fun to explore. The (real) efficiency gaines in old europe were stunning. We were still making big steppes on a regular basis, but as our technical advancements progressed our steps have gotten smaller ever since. IMHO we have already started to regress, and our attempts to "solve" this are getting desperate.

Our focus will shift towards the fact that less and less energy will be available for our society, because a big percentage of our remaining energy will be needed for the energy sector itself. At some point something has to give and that will be the beginning of the sharing era. People can't survive on their own because we aren't "smart" enough to know everything. So you need a big group of all sorts of people to make everything functioning in a sustainable way. Human leveraged power combined with wind powered movement and a whole lot more clever things will be "reinvented".
And in a couple of years time, new improvements(efficiency gaines) will increase living standerds again.
Because we found our fossils their was no need to explore that route, so we didn't.

More and more people are waking up to this event, and I hope a tipping point in thinking will be reached before we all go south.

Jabberwock,
If I were you, I would get your co-workers really upset and tell them that a bunch of amateurs on TOD probably are better at geological and earth sciences than they are. Tell them it all has to do with how committed one is to finding out scientific truth. Unfortunately, you probably wouldn't be able to look them in the eye again after you do this :(

The fact is that conventional natural gas goes through a Dispersive Discovery cycle just like anything else. Additional discoveries of alternative forms or sources of natural gas will occur concurrent and shifted to that cycle. This goes under the category of you might not find something unless you are purposely looking for it. Think about that last statement and how it may have happened to you in your own daily life. (BTW, the entire concept of Dispersive Discovery and dispersive analysis did not get discovered until I started looking for it and thus came up with it, but that's another story.)

I don't know why some common logic cannot be applied to these problems. Most of them are simple bean-counting problems that I could probably teach to a grade schooler. Of course the grade schooler would have to some familiarity with probability & statistics, but that's a detail.

So look at what Laherrere plotted

So what would you like us to do concerning natural gas? Should we model the possibility of what that new alternative discovery curve will look like? In terms of a profile, it will likely look like a spike, since all we really have to do physically is retrace our steps and look for the unconventional NG in places where we previously looked for oil and conventional NG.

I don't know if Simmons has done this but Simmons does not speak for everyone and from what I can tell does not show his math, choosing instead to use his experience as an argument. If we want to really understand this, we probably would want to delve into the analysis.

Bottom-line is that we cannot preclude that another source for Natural Gas exists, potentially lying interstitially in some formation that we haven't investigated yet, like some peat bog. Or it could be tied up in those methane hydrates. But as Dirty Harry would say, "do you feel lucky"?

I don't know that Simmons alone can be blamed for the mis-call on NG. It was a fairly widespread opinion here at TOD that NG's peak was not far behind oil's. The shale surge does not seem to have been anticipated.

How big an influence it will ultimately have on the NG production curve is what we're all interested in.

The whole thing has made me a tad more cautious. I initially gave some advice to my condo board on NG, and saw it run up 13+. Made me smell good. Then it started diving as I saw more and more written on shale gas. And I didn't smell so good -- kind of like mercaptan. I went back to Campbell and Deffeyes and could find little or no hint of this coming.