The Oil Drum

[editor's note, by Dave] Throughout, I will refer to the the global fossil fuels supply chain construed as a network by the acronym GFFSC. There is only a little math in this post. I will be referring to some pages where they do the math. This is meant to be a "naive", intuitive treatment. The mathematicians among us can take the ball and run with it.

I spend a lot of time worrying about ruptures in the GFFSC and what their effects will be. Standardly, these are called oil shocks at TOD. I just picked up the July 1-7 issue of New Scientist and there were two related articles of interest to me, "The Net Reloaded" and "Life is Unpredictable". Sorry, they are both behind a paywall. But I will refer to them in the text below. Ever since Stuart had mentioned Didier Sornette in his excellent post Is Oil In A Price Bubble?, I had also been thinking about so-called endogenous versus exogenous origins of crises, as Sornette puts it. The latter are forcings from outside the network. In other words, oil shocks. The former are due to the inherent self-organizing nature of the network itself.

Finally, it occurred to me to model the GFFSC as a scale-free network somewhat analogous to the internet and see where that went. I have never seen this kind of analysis done before and thought it would be interesting as a new take on peak oil and our current dilemma.