Even better would be to stick with FSU instead of conflating what are two quite different data sets.

My experience at TOD over the last 2 years has taught me that unfortunately Khebab will publish very misleading graphs if he thinks he can make a point with them.

A few weeks back somebody with a decent stats background completely lost his cool here on account of one of Khebab's masterpieces. Not that it did any good.

Khebab, do you have any formal training in statistical methods?

If so, one of these days the God of Regressions or perhaps the Devil is going to singe your behind! ;-)

I don't think it has a lot of impact as far as C+C is concerned, I don't see any major differences with this ASPO chart:

Their peak is ~250 kbpd lower than mine.

Just like Yergin, his name is going to become synonymous with BS.

Oh, Bull! Look, whether Deffeyes' 2005 peak stands or not is of secondary importance. His was a rare voice warning of a likely early peak in world oil production when such authoritative bodies as the IEA and EIA were still projecting a 20 - 30 million bpd increase over the next twenty years. Deffeyes has earned his stripes. Yergin has proven himself to be little more than a mouthpiece (for whom, I'm not entirely sure but I would bet that it is someone with a lot of cash on the line).

Look I don't really care who calls it and who gets it right or not. If you want to get all steamed up Asebius, becasue of some obscure mathematical issues that most of us don't really understand then go right ahead. But let me ask you this: Do you think that oil production will reach a peak within your own lifetime?

Ok, for the sake of argument lets take your word for it: it takes five years after peak to recognize the peak with curve fitting.

So, how come guys like Deffeyes are prancing around ahead of time predicting peak with HL without providing a study of the reliability of the method?

What I could never figure out was why there are only two HL graphs or so in Deffeyes book (his last one). The guy was cherry picking like you wouldn't believe.

Just like Yergin, his name is going to become synonymous with BS.

You're damned foolish if you think a new peak that is anywhere within 3 or 4 mb/d is in any way significant, meaningful or useful. You're a perfect example of someone who knows a lot, but can't think his way out of a paper bag. To put it another way, you're like the dweeb who says things like, "I TOLD you the circumference of the circle when drawing the tire must be 1.5 inches and not 1.49!" to his friend drawing cars during recess in 4th Grade.

Please, just shut up unless you have something to say that makes even the tiniest difference.

Cheers

In order to know where the true peak is, all the EROI's from all fields need to be calculated. And then a certain number of barrels of oil needs to be subtracted from the total production numbers of each field, based on that field's EROI. If this isnt done then the production data is not accurate or complete because we dont know how much energy is used to produce the oil.

Here's a simple thought exercise to illustrate my point. Imagine if we found 10 trillion barrels of oil 10 miles under north america, embedded in shale. And imagine if we produced 5 million new barrels a day from this supergiant field. That would be great, as far as the charts are concerned. But if it costed 4 million barrels of oil to build all the infrastructure necessary to tap and pump all that oil, then it wouldnt mean nearly as much. This is an extreme example, but the point is that we are consuming more and more oil just trying to keep production at the plateau it is currently on. That is why I believe we are already well past the "true peak" of net oil production. And as any investor who still has his shirt knows, it is the NET that counts. There are hundreds of companies whose revenues are going up, but their stocks are losing value because their expenses are rising faster than revenue. That same dynamic applies to oil production.

I think we hit the "true peak" way back around 2001. (Probably right around 9/11/2001. How's that for a conspiracy theory!)

Found some more of the article at DU

But the agency is now worried that aging oil fields and diminished investment mean that companies could struggle to break beyond 100 million barrels a day over the next two decades.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&add...

Here's the whole thing via Google News (sorry but I couldn't figure out a way to just post a link that would display the whole thing!)
I expect this to be a bombshell...

Oil Monitor to Slash Estimate
Of World's Supply of Crude
By NEIL KING JR. and PETER FRITSCH
May 21, 2008 3:10 p.m.

The world's premier energy monitor is preparing a sharp downward revision of its oil-supply forecast, a shift that reflects deepening pessimism over whether oil companies can keep abreast of booming demand.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency is in the middle of a large study of the condition of world's top oil fields. Its findings won't be released until November, but the bottom line is already clear: Future crude-oil supplies could be far tighter than previously thought.

The IEA has predicted for several years that crude-oil supplies will arc gently upward to keep pace with rising demand, topping 116 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 87 million barrels a day now. But the agency is now worried that aging oil fields and diminished investment mean that companies could struggle to break beyond 100 million barrels a day over the next two decades.

The agency's forecasts are widely tracked throughout the oil patch, so a blast of cold air from the IEA could further rattle an oil market that has already seen crude prices rocket over $130 a barrel, double what they were a year ago.

Midday on the New York Mercantile Exchange Wednesday, crude for July delivery, the new front month, was at $131.55, up $2.57, or 2%. Year-to-date, crude oil is up $35.57, or 37%

"This is very important because the IEA is treated as the world's only serious independent guardian of energy data and forecasts," said Edward Morse, chief energy economist at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. The study, he said, could act "as a prod" for greater transparency within an industry known for intense secrecy.

The IEA monitors energy markets for the world's 26 most-advanced economies, including the U.S., Japan and all of Europe, who also pay the agency's bills. Its role is to act as a counterweight in the market to the views of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The IEA's endorsement of a crimped supply scenario will likely be interpreted by the cartel as yet another call to pump more oil -- a call it will have a difficult time answering. At the same time, the IEA's conclusions will likely be seized on by advocates of expanded drilling in prohibited areas like the U.S. outer continental shelf or the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge.

The IEA's findings echo the gathering supply-side gloom in much of the oil patch, articulated by numerous Big Oil executives in recent months and prompting numerous upward revisions to long-term oil-price forecasts on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. grabbed headlines recently with a forecast saying that oil could top $140 a barrel this summer and could average $200 a barrel next year. Prices that high would put a serious strain on the world economy.

The IEA is now trying to shed light on some of the industry's best-kept secrets through a study of the world's top 400 oil fields. With behind-the-scenes assistance from major oil companies, oil-field-service companies, energy ministries and consultants, the agency hopes to assess the overall health of major fields scattered from Venezuela and Mexico to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. The fields supply more than two-thirds of daily world production.

The study, employing the efforts of a team of 25 analysts, marks a sea change in the IEA's efforts to peer into the future. In the past, the agency focused mainly on assessing future demand and then looked at how much non-OPEC countries were likely to produce to meet that demand. Any gap, it was assumed, would then be met by big OPEC producers such as Saudi Arabia, Iran or Kuwait.

Critics charge that the U.S. Energy Department's own forecasting shop, the Energy Information Administration, still sticks to the same demand-driven methodology, assuming that supply will keep up with the world's growing hunger for oil.

The EIA has embarked on its own supply study, which it hopes to complete this summer. Its preliminary findings are also somewhat gloomy, with a forecast saying that only significant increments of nonconventional fuels like ethanol will push global fuel supplies over 100 million barrels a day by 2030.

"We are optimistic in terms of resource availability but wary about whether the investments get made in the right places and at a pace that will bring on supply to meet demand," says Guy Caruso, the EIA's chief economist.

In Paris, analysts at IEA also fret that a lack of investment in many OPEC countries, combined with a diminished incentive to ramp up output, cast serious doubt over how much the cartel will expand its production going forward. Big non-OPEC producers like Mexico, the U.S. and Russia, meanwhile, are looking at slumping production and their own uncertain investment climates.

The IEA work aims to tally the range of investments and projects under way to raise production from the fields in question. That way, the agency hopes to get a clearer sense of what to expect in the way of production flows.

Fatih Birol, the IEA's chief economist, said the hurdles already look high. "One of our findings will be that the oil investments required may be much, much higher than what people assume," he said. "This is a dangerous situation."

The IEA study will dig into one of the issues that most bedevils those trying to forecast future prices and the supply/demand balance: how rapidly the world's top fields are declining. Oil-field-depletion rates are a much-debated barometer of the health of the world's oil patch. A study released earlier this year by the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a U.S.-based consultancy, crunched the numbers on 811 of the biggest fields and concluded that the world-wide depletion rate was around 4.5% a year. At that rate, oil companies have to make huge investments just to keep their production steady. Others say the number could be higher.

"We are of the opinion that the public isn't aware of the role of the decline rate of existing fields in the energy supply balance, and that this rate will accelerate in the future," says Mr. Birol, who is leading the IEA's field study.

The IEA study won't be definitive. Big producers like Venezuela, Iran and China aren't cooperating with the study. Other producing nations like Saudi Arabia typically treat specific production data of individual fields as closely guarded state secrets.

To get around that, the IEA will depend on data gathered by IHS Inc., a major data and analysis provider in the U.S., as well as the U.S. Geologic Survey, a smattering of oil companies and national petroleum councils. Some oil-service companies are also lending a hand. The agency also plans to do computer modeling to make estimates where it lacks firm data.

Critics of the IEA praise the continuing study but also say a revision of the agency's long-term forecasts is long overdue. The agency has missed many of the big energy developments in recent years, like the surge in Chinese demand in 2004 and this year's skyrocketing prices. "The IEA is always conflicted by political pressures," said Chris Skrebowski, a London-based oil analyst who keeps his own database on big petroleum projects around the world. "In this case I think they want to make as inconvertible as possible the fact that we are facing a real crunch."

It would probably help if both of these sources showed annual net export graphs.

Net Exports/Net Imports refers to total liquids--crude + petroleum products.

Even with the best data, who's to say what the right decisions are? I doubt I'd agree with Mr. Simmons.

But yeah... openness, rules and accountability would come in real handy right now. Judging by the lack of scandal over Iraq, I doubt we're going to see much of that over a few mbpd. What are the incentives for playing fair anyway?

Also, uncertainty itself can explain a good deal of the market disturbance.
It's a little early to call even peak exports with certainty in my humble opinion: a plateau in spite of ballooning prices is distressing enough.

Ziz

On blog sites its difficult to know whether the contributor has a sense of humour or not. One has to write a reply and sit back and wait for the response!

I chuckled when I read this and my initial thoughts on the order of the letters was obvious, but there is much truth in what you say. If you listen to the R4 programme above one guy says we have been walking into this for at least 10 years, C Skrebowski says we are at the foothill of peak oil, where the light sweet crude we all require is in short supply. The next kick is net a exports declining, followed by the peak, where nobody anwhere with oil of any kind can increase production; full stop.