The filling of existing strategic petroleum reserves (SPRs), and the creation of new ones should also mitigate the decline by postponing some consumption.  The US Congress has authorized the US SPR to be enlarged by 300 million barrels.  I suppose that China and India will proceed with their own SPR stockpiling.  I wonder what the attitude of producers will be when the peak is past?  Will we see "custodianship" take precedence over "reliable supplies"?

We had our office Xmas party last weekend, and one of my coworkers came up and asked if I was serious about what I said in my report on Bartlett's conference.  She looked so unhappy that I felt like the Grinch.

It makes sense that the world decline would be slower than the US or UK--more diverse supply, and a lot of newer production coming on-line.

If this is anywhere close to correct, it will require a radical rethinking within the peak oil community. We'd average a mere 0.5% annual decline rate for the 1st post-peak decade, 1.5% for the second, and 2.5% for the third. There will be demand pressures, and local shortages and surpluses, of course. But we should be able to accomodate those sort of declines with simple, non-radical conservation efforts.

But oil-related greenhouse gases would remain high for decades, and the global economy keeps ticking along. Motoring may be easier, but the climate won't be so pleasant.

• I expect deepwater production from West Africa, Brazil and some other places to replicate the North Sea decline rates some few years from now (after 2011?)
• Given the "above ground" geopolitical or investment issues for the Middle East, Russian and the Caspian Sea that can inhibit increased production flows, this kind of purely "Hubbert mathematics" analysis is interesting but--to be fair, as you note--are you really modelling the real world here? You're also discounting oil shocks and the usual delays.
• Concerning that last point, what about the ever-growing number of small producers like the Sudan (which exports to China) or Mauritania and their contributions to the world's oil supply? Is production from these smaller producer countries both geopolitically reliable and economical based on price going forward? More numerous smaller producers (without Megaprojects) are becoming more and more important to the world supply & demand equation. I wish I knew how to model this important future trend.
• In that last graph with a peak at 2009, you refer to "adaptation". I am still trying to figure out what the hell that means. I just don't see much elasticity in the system either here in the US or in China.
• Increasing internal demand (consumption) in some exporting countries makes oil less available for export on the world market. How does this affect supply for the "addicts" as opposed to the abilities of the "dealers" to increase their daily production numbers?

While it would be nice to believe that we might have a nice gentle slope on which we can make some sort of transition, I think we would be better served assuming the worst -- just in case that horrible scenario turns out to be accurate.

The best way to prepare an economy for a disconnect is to welcome the change and use the adjustment in infrastructure to help fuel the economy as we transistion. An economy is an economy is an economy no matter if it is oil based or solar based, growth based or steady state. The important thing is we must plan and not let the vagaries of the so-called invisible hand of the market make decisions for us. The invisible hand of the market is merely the eccentric wobblings of a chaotic system. If we are to descend into energy rationalitiy, we need to recognize that chaos is the opposite of civilization. Just letting the chaos engine swing into the frentic, destructive portion of its cycle because the political economists of this era want it to fit their models is not only irrational, it is kinda dumb.

Whether or not this provides us some reprieve from the impact of peak oil is still up for debate. Supply is not the only issue here. If demand continues to rise in places like the U.S and China, in a world of shrinking supply, that oil is going to come from somewhere. The where is from the poorest nations and people. The rich counrtries will still get there oil, but what happens to those countries that can no longer afford it? They don't show up on a bell curve.

David

   as others have alluded to above, the real world thought that i wonder about is the accessability of oil...oil IS power, and countries will( or are) start thinking, "why am i giving this stuff away?" or "what will my population use after i sell it all to the americans?"

How can decline rates be 5% or less when we're going to have Burgan, Daqing, Cantarell and probably Ghawar declining with double digits in the next few years. It does not compute!

I more inclined to believe your earlier post that had decline rates about 8% for the world.  That would be somewhere between the US and the North Sea.

I tried creating some theoretical production graphs that were different shapes to see how they looked when they were 'linearised', and the graphs with steep accelerating declines caused the linear model to curve down to an ultimate Q that was much less than the earlier linear part of the graph predicted.

You can sort of see that in the UK linearisation graph above.  The last bit looks more like a curve than a straight line and that curve may yet bend right down to an ultimate Q of 24 or 25 Gb, instead of the projected 28 Gb.

That's why I'd like to see some real linearisation graphs of fields that have been almost completely depleted using high production techniques and technologies. Matt Simmons had a whole lot of production graphs from individual fields in the North Sea.  It would interesting to see the linearisation graphs for some of those fields.

Your analysis is very interesting (as always) however apart from BP, which is most inimical to the whole concept of depletion, what do the other oil majors have to say about future production declines?  I understand that Exxon Mobil forecasts a 4-6% world decline rate and that "by 2015, we will need to find, develop and produce a volume of new oil and gas that is equal to eight out of every ten barrels being produced today."

  Heading for the hills,in a orderly,careful fashion is still a  rational,intelligent,responce to the information avalible.

 The key word not used above is  " IF "!!

 The green zone is of us tooling along changing everything we can change and doing our best to make sure as few people die as possible and that the rest of us live decent lives.  Decent might not mean a McMansion, but a small place just big enough for us, but not small or tight. As well as bringing the guy who lives in a tent into a home with some better protection from the elements.  A general balancing out of things.

 The above is a Utopian dream, and as we all know that means "no place" so we might more likely see a mix of all the colors.

 I hope that we can be better in the handling of this than we were with say "Katrina" , but I do not have the faith in the general public that some of you might.

 We will have winners, and we will have workers and we will likely have a lot of losers as well.  

 Very good work by the way, THANKS!

The analogy is to capacitance in electrical circuits or dampers in mechanical systems.  Put two capacitors in parallel and you sum the individual capacitors. Discharge rates are inversely proporational to capacitance. Therefore the high discharge rates have low capacity and thus contribute little to the overall capacitance of the system.

And I still do not understand the ridiculous fawning over the logistic model and Hubbert linearization.  It's misguided, people! The mathematics behind it makes absolutely no sense.

No wonder we go through all these gyrations to make sense of things that become perfectly obvious if you use the correct model in the first place.

Good work as usual.  Some comments and suggestions.

First, I would use the Lower 48 production as a model, not the entire U.S., for two reasons:  (1)  the Lower 48 peaked before Prudhoe Bay started producing and (2)  Alaska is very far removed geographically from the Lower 48.   If you just use the Lower 48 production, it peaked at 48% of Qt (total estimated cumulative production).  The swing producer within the Lower 48, Texas, peaked at 54% of Qt.  

In my opinion, Saudi Arabia, now at 55% of Qt, is to the world, now at 50% of Qt, as Texas is to the Lower 48.

In regard to the UK, I think that it makes more sense to use total North Sea production as a model.  As we both noted, the Y (P/Q) intercept for the North Sea is much greater than the Lower 48 and Texas, but it is very interesting to compare Texas and the North Sea.  

The Qt for the two regions are very close, 66 Gb for Texas, 60 Gb for the North Sea.  Texas peaked at 54% of Qt; the North Sea at 52%.  The huge difference was peak production.  Texas peaked at 3.5 mbpd, while the North Sea peaked just shy of 6 mbpd.   Given very similar ultimate recoverable reserves, this implies a much greater decline rate for the North Sea--which is implied by the P/Q intercept, which is precisely what we have seen.

So, regardless of the P/Q intercept countries and regions are peaking  (in the absence of political problems, e.g.,.Iran) at around 50% of Qt.  The P/Q intercept does give one a good idea of the future decline rate.

If memory serves, the P/Q intercepts for the Lower 48 and Texas are almost identical.  The net decline for Texas 10 years after we peaked, after an intensive drilling program, was about 28% (from 3.5 mbpd to 2.5 mbpd).   Using the crude + condensate number, and ignoring the non-conventional stuff, and if we peak this year, this suggests that conventional oil production around 2015 would be about 50 mbpd, down from 73 mbpd currently. Of course, what we would like to consume is growing at annual rate of around 2% per annum.

Now the Chinese can finish all those freeways they're busy building and add the 600 million vehicles envisioned ... as they follow our exact path into the abyss.

An analysis by Hirsch (found on EB, Nov. 19) stated that on a national basis, decline rates are typically greater than 2% directly following peak (2% is the benchmark of the US decline rate, lower 48 states).  He suggested that individual nations experience not broad and widely plateaued  Hubbert curves, but actually follow a sharp, triangular curve type.  this is based on data from North America, Norway, UK, Argentina, Colombia, and Egypt.  the world peak may (and most likely will) be broader, but in the end, it may not matter much.  in this case, the devil really is in the details.  

This is a question for economic science rather than natural science. I wonder if there are any economists out there who could comment?

We have a global economy that is based on perpetual growth. Banks create money in the form of loans and to be able to pay back these loans (with interest), the borrower's business must grow. This debt-based economy counts on tomorrows expansion to repay todays loans. But Peak Oil means that tomorrow does not bring expansion. My fear is that the perpetual growth economy will not be able to cope with a gradual decline or even a plateau in energy supplies. Without growth, an economy that is based on growth is likely to simply collapse.

As panarchist points out above, the global economy is predicted to need vastly more oil than available.

Your figures for slow decline reinforce my belief that the most pressing problem is not actually a problem of significant shortfalls in energy supplies. Conservation, relatively minor sacrifices, and alternative energy sources could probably make up for the shortfalls in the first post peak years.

However, if our growth economy collapses, efforts to cope with the root problem of energy depletion will become drastically more challenging and the human suffering will be much greater.

In this light, the most pressing problem seems to be an economic one.

Just for fun,  an example of a province which doesn´t fit the logistic  curve.
Surely Austria is a tiny oil province, although we were self sufficient until 1958. Our peak was in 1955, in 1945 Nazi germany -of which Austria was part of-  collapsed, but otherwise no political or economical impediments to production.
As an aside, Austria uses less than half the amount of oil to produce 1000 US $ worth of gross national product than the US, and yet we are one of the ten richest nations on earth. (Oil consumption per capita per year is approximately 8,5 Barrels).  

http://www.geologie.ac.at/pdf/oelref2005.pdf Page 13 to 15

That's not quite right though. Even if we have a decades long slow plateau/decline at the global level, individual countries can still undergo punishing decline rates of 10% or more. For example, here's some Type III decline rates calculated for 2004:

Australia: -12%
Papua New Guinea: -10%
UK: -10%
Trinidad & Tobago: -9%
Peru: -8%
Yemen: -7%
Congo Brazzaville: -7%
Indonesia: 4%

The UK is a classic case. Regardless of whether the global decline is slow, the rapid decline of UK oil and gas is a big problem for the UK. Similarly, declines in Mexico and Indonesia could have severe fiscal consequences for those countries themselves.

The global figures aren't fine-grained enough to capture the nuances of the problem. I think all the worry about the US, Canada, UK and Australia is overblown. Those countries have tremendous resources -- economic, human and physical (i.e. coal and nuclear) -- and they will stick together. The hard part will be helping weaker countries through the transition, so they don't degenerate into poverty/mayhem and destabilize the global system. For example, the U.S. needs to take a much closer look at Mexico.

I understand your models and and agree with approach but have two questions about global supply vs individual fields.

1.  To date much of the production has come from relatively few fields and/or from very developed countries that can recover the oil efficiently.  What happens when a majority of these locations go into decline?  In theory oil from more, widely scattered smaller fields will offset the decline of fewer larger ones and slow the decline, at least early on.  Do you think this is physically possible knowing how many wells, pipelines and distribution systems need to be established?

2.  If in the past oil was fungible by having inherent supply greater than demand.  What happens when demand exceeds supply (or wants to)?  Will oil still be fungible?  Or will nation states want to hoard supply for future use and not bring it to market?

Maybe I missed it but I don't see how these are factored into the shape of the global curve.  The curve by default is the best case scenario for depletion.  I think I have pointed out two but what factors (if any) could impact the curve so it does not hold to the sigmoid shape post peak?

I suspect the reason for this is the one Matthew Simmons mentions: that since 1970, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has gotten wider and wider.  When the Club of Rome made their prediction in Limits to Growth, they assumed that the rest of the world would be catching up to the U.S.  But instead of a car in every garage, all over the world, we got two cars, an SUV, an ATV, and a boat in American garages, while in Africa a bike is still beyond a lot of people.

This continues today.  Americans gripe about high prices, but really haven't cut back.  Meanwhile, there have been riots over fuel prices in Indonesia, Yemen, Panama, etc.

It could go on for quite awhile after peak oil - demand destruction mostly in poor countries - but only if other countries continue to let us buy on credit.  It's in their interest to keep lending to us, because if we go down, we'll take the world economy with us.  But it can't go on forever, and if it unravels, it could be quite messy.  Even economists who are not worried about peak oil are worried about our staggering debt, and what will happen if the dollar collapses.

What do you think, Stuart?

Thank you very much for all your time and effort on this subject.  You are opening our minds and helping to educate us!

My concerns are:

1.    I'm not sure this is what the picture looks like - my impression is that we get most of our oil from a relatively small number of very big fields.  The North Sea is one of them - but I'm not sure I understand what the "BP" data represents - is this representative of generalized world production?  What do the other big ones look like, and will they distort the picture?  

2.    How valid is the data used?  My understanding is that the data for at least the biggest producer is suspect.  If we don't know how hard SA is pushing their fields, then how can we be sure they will not change the shape of the depletion curve?

3.    Also, the premise is that the new technologies used to extend maximum output are used everywhere - but is this so, and even if it is, will it have the same results everywhere it is used (i.e. less effective in some places, more damaging in others)?

Essentially, what is the relationship between the BP data, UK North Sea, and what does it imply about the world data in general?

I never quite found the answer (or did not understand it) to the question:

Since those technologies are being applied everywhere these days, maybe global production will behave like the UK, which would be extremely hard for the world economy to handle.

Isn't all based on the valididty of the world data - and how accurate do we think this dta is?

I personally think it is important to try to understand or project how oil supplies will (if?) decline (the decline rate) the next decade. It could be that an evaluation of the R/P (Reserves divided with Production) ratios as these stood at end 2004 could give a supplementary helpful hint.

I used the oil (all liquids) reserves and production data as these are presented in BP Statistical Review 2005. Further the World has been split into three categories;

·    OPEC
·    FSU (Former Soviet Union)
·    ROW (Rest Of World (World minus (OPEC+FSU)))

Category              R/P       Share of world prod.
                    (Years)            (%) 2004

OPEC                   74,0               41,0
FSU                    29,0               14,2
ROW                    13,5               44,8

ROW as tabulated above has the biggest share of world oil production, but the smallest R/P ratio.

Even though the R/P ratio for ROW has only seen a slight decline through the last years, the ratio suggests that production could enter into a steep decline in the near future for this group of countries.

Question then is how steep will the decline for ROW become, and how fast would OPEC (and FSU) have to add production increases to maintain the world depletion rates as suggested by the Hubbert's analysis (which so excellent has been presented in this thread)?

It should also be given due considerations to expected declines from Burgan, Cantarell, Ghawar and other giants that will start to decline in the near future.

The above could suggest that as declines sets in, it could initially become more dramatic (higher decline rates) as suggested by the presented Hubbert analysis, and the decline rates could of course slow later on.

Fact is as of now no one knows how global oil supplies will decline when it starts (we are presently flying blind here), that is why I found Hirsch's article on this subject very important.

Lower 48, 6.2%; Texas, 6.0%; Iran, 13.0%;  North Sea, 13.5%; Saudi Arabia, 7.0% and the World, 5.0%.

For Texas, the actual net decline rate (net after all new production) is about two-thirds of the P/Q intercept.  For the North Sea, the net decline rate is about half of the P/Q intercept.  

This suggests that the world will experience a net decline rate, from conventional production, of about 2.5% to 3.3% per year, post-peak.  3% would be a good guess.   In round numbers, it suggests that net conventional oil production will initially drop at the rate of about 2 mbpd per year.     Note that in four years, the drop would be roughly equal to all of Saudi Arabia's current oil exports.

Of course, with demand growing at 2% per year, this is a 5% year over year shortfall between what the supply is and what we would like to consume.  

I was interested in Saudi Oil Minister Naimi's comments, "We do not intend to be the swing producer in the future."

In any case, a crucial point regarding a 2% to 3% world decline rate is that almost all of this decline--my guess is 90% plus--will come from the export side, and not domestic consumption in exporting countries.  

I believe that net world oil exports are on the order of 33 mbpd.   Using the crude + condensate number, if oil production drops by 10 mbpd over a five year period, my bet is that at least 9 mbpd of this will come from the export side.  So, a 14% drop in overall conventional oil production would, in my opinion, equate to at least a 27% drop in net oil exports.  As Kenneth Deffeyes pointed out, this will result in a war for the remaining oil exports.  He just hopes that it is fought with dollars and not with nuclear weapons.

this theory does imply that some economic growth will be possible for quite a long time.

Whether that's a good thing for the long-term future of humanity is a different question.

This is not inconsistent with the overshoot and collapse predicted in Limits to Growth. Indeed, the authors said in Limits to Growth: the 30 Year Update (2004)

The end of growth, in whatever form, seemed to us to be a very distant prospect in 1972. All World3 scenarios in LTG showed growth in population and economy continuing well past the year 2000. Even in the most pessimistic LTG scenario the material standard of living kept increasing all the way to 2015.

Am I right to think that this prediction is in fact completely constructed around the interpretation of this graph?

Because I'd say that the Hubbertlinearization of the US production has "bumps" on it, which could indicate that Deffeyes still could be right. It has one at 100 Gb, the few years among the peak. The point I'm trying to get across is that the difference between your an Deffeyes lines may be lost in the noise.