I believe PPUE is a valuable tool for evaluating our situation.

Good post. As some have pointed out in the Drumbeat (comments were disabled here initially), there may be some quirks to this analysis that make it not as meaningful as it could be (oil comes from wells, not rigs, etc.), which could be refined in further analyses, but I think this is definitely another step forward towards providing more accurate assessment of the quality of the remaining oil reserves than a simple EROEI figure would reveal. EROEI doesn't incorporate all the embedded energy in the infrastructure and labour required to get the stuff out.

I do, however, have a minor quibble with your characterization of oil as a non-biological resource. It's interesting because this fisheries analysis may not be too far off from a genuine application to oil extraction as one might initially assume. Both fishing and drilling for oil are basically doing the same thing -- expending effort to harvest mysterious sea creatures from the deep ... and then burning them. With oil, we dig up ancient algae that got buried in the sea floor, and then we burn them in our cars. With fishing, we instead catch living fish, with nets, and then burn them in our bodies when we eat them.

Just another example demonstrating that we are still 100% dependent on ecological fixation of carbon for our survival, regardless of how much technology we have. With the exception of the 4% of global energy supply that comes from solar and wind technologies (and nuclear too, which however seems to be on a decline), all technology does is make us better at finding, harvesting, and burning that fixed carbon. Try to convince that to any mainstream economist, though.

Oil is like a milkshake.

It's a wonderful discovery when you're young to be given a delicious glass of ice cold milkshake; you suck it down enjoying the moment, forgetting all else, then you get near the bottom and the air gets into the straw, so you poke around the rim at the bottom and tilt the glass to get the last drops out, but you don't give up, you finally guide the straw around the sides of the glass to try and capture what you missed, and finally you lick the inside of the rim with your tongue. It's pretty desperate at the end.

But even kids realise that when the glass is empty there isn't any more milkshake left.

But perhaps some kids think that they will be given new milkshakes as often as they want them, for ever.... do they?

I think the essential idea is that the current volume plateau for liquid fuels is actually a downward slope if net energy is used, the turning point having occurred some years ago. A few months back I suggested that the component series be downweighted to reflect useful fraction after the internal effort required, the factor being (e-1)/e where e is EROEI.

Examples; tar sands EROEI 4 useful fraction 3/4, giant conventional oil field EROEI 20 useful fraction 19/20, corn ethanol EROEI 1.25 useful fraction 1/5 and so on. The advantage of this metric over PPUE may be that it is not technology specific requiring rig counts or fishing hours. Also EROEI should take into account upfront effort as well as ongoing, for example the energy embodied in the fishing boat.

Thus a constant flow of liquid fuels in barrels per day will convert to a declining series as EREOI wanes. With coal more remote deeper deposits require more digging and transport. LNG takes substantial liquefaction effort as well as shipping across oceans. My guess is peak useful oil happened in the period 2000-2010, peak useful gas will arrive about 2020 and peak useful coal not long after that.

Great post. A couple suggestions intended to help this get the attention it deserves beyond ToD:

In the figure titles, the phrase "ratio of A to B" typically means A/B, not B/A. Skimming the figures left me very confused.

Also, you should be more explicit in the introduction about how you're defining "effort" -- it's simply active rig count, right? If so, you need to wrestle with the fact that not all rigs are equal. A "There Will Be Blood" wooden derrick is not the same thing as a 21st century deepwater platform. Even considering only modern technology, oil rigs are much more varied in their scale of effort than, say, New England fishing trawlers.

Good arguments to refute the cornucopians with.

This may not be perfect but it is simple and to the point. It is very easy to understand. Almost idiot proof if it wasn't for the quality of the idiots.

Well done

Very nice post. The work left is to incorporate how decreased production per effort interacts with economic production, and how this will in turn effect oil production.

In response to several comments above, I would like to point out that there is a major problem with units when one tries to measure economic production. The most common unit is money, but this is a deeply flawed unit as it is constantly being manipulated. Money is many things, among which it is a measure of value, but a very non democratic measure of value as there is a great consentration of wealth among few individuals, giving them many more votes than the average person. One can switch to units of energy. This has the advantage of being a tamper proof unit, but the disadvantage of not taking into account what we actually do with energy. People who study EROEI are using this unit. Ayres and Warr introduced the unit of "useful work". This is efficiency times energy production. It measures how much energy gets turned into mechanical energy. This unit goes more towards measuring what we do with energy and gives a measure of technological progress. One can carry this idea further by measuring exactly what we do with the energy, for example measuring vehicle kilometers traveled per year, but then we end up with several economies with incompatible units. One can also consider man-hours of work. I think all these units give insight into different aspects of the economy.

One thing I like about this post is precisely that the effort variable is left somewhat open. One can measure barrels per Kwh, barrels per dollar, barrels per foot drilled, etc. I think all of these units shed a slightly different light on oil production and the economy.

theoretically this is a perfectly valid tool. I'm sure you'll figure it out with help from people much more savvy than myself in regards to this business. I'm fairly new to this site, and my interest is more on the geo-politics. The technical discussions are largely above my head. That said, it occurs to me that this method at least implicitly takes into account externalities, but i can't figure out to what extent; for example, is it not true that squeezing out those last drops takes more water and energy input, and if those inputs (and the resulting extra pollution) increase at some exponential factor, than perhaps the PPUE might be under-represented to this point? Just a thought. Good work, good luck, many thanks to you, the people who run thus site, and the commentors who help me understand these issues to a much greater degree. Truly grateful.

Needs thought.. I suspect there are some big holes in this model that need addressing but I am not seeing it. The real cost per well graph is shocking

one of the better ideas I have seen around here for some time.

I think this is a useful concept & appreciate the keypost.

I will kick out a slight cautionary tale of using CPUE from the "fisheries management" perspective. There too, it's a useful concept, but it can be manipulated politically. Depends how it comes to be used.

I'll just share one painful example. In early '78 (I think it was), Hawaii congresswoman Patsy Mink decided to champion the cultural rights of the Alaskan Inuit with regard to killing endangered bowhead whales. (Which are, interestingly the longest-lived giant-brained creatures on earth.)

She managed to get a small bowhead kill quota for US natives by trading with Japan on the sperm whale quota.

The way this was managed behind closed doors was by inserting an arbitrary coefficient into the model, relating to the increased efficiency of killing sperm whales using ASDIC sonar. The data seemed to indicate that 100% was right, but the dealing with Mink resulted in a bilateral agreement between Japan and the USA that the coefficient be changed to 5%. This created a "paper reality" in which the population of sperm whales exploded, and the kill quota was raised from 763 in '77 to 6,444 in '78.

All quite scientific, except that it wasn't. I don't mean to be off-topic, just sharing an anecdote which still rankles decades later, about a fight I lost.