exroid -- taking upon myself to speak for all the thousands of us in the oil patch we all understand PO and agree it is upon us. But, yes, I don't know CEO of a public company or one board member who would say so publicly but who wouldn't agree privately. I personally don't get into the curve fitting and numeric models. Being a geologist I tend to keep my models simple...I'll leave that to the less math challenged. I don't try to estimate how much spay any one skunk might put out on any given day. But I know it stinks. And so, IMO, does the prospect for the world's ability to carry on FF BAU.

I would hazard a guess that secondary peaks -and perhaps even a longer 'bumpy plataue' are caused by real world 'harmonics' -i.e. the 2nd higher order impacts discussed above. This makes sense because the human 'energy system' can divert resources and borrow from the future to expand current production via debt.

-In the simple fox and rabit case the foxes cannot 'import' rabbits from outside the system at the first signs of 'rabbit scarcity' so it is a simple bell shape.

Nick.

I've been an Oil Drum reader for several years and this is my first post. Finally have something worth contributing... I think :)

I think Ugo's model is a great explanation for the 1st order cycle of depletion for non-renewable resources. However, xeroid has a good point that simple, single modal distributions don’t fit historical data sets very well.

I think classical economics supply and demand drivers are a good explanation for 2nd order cycles that all of us who have spent time in the oil industry (and/or studied its history) are well aware of.

Perhaps, early in the cycle of depletion, the 2nd order supply and demand effect actually dominates the signal (and is mis-interpreted as the 1st order driver).

Let’s take the predator / prey mechanism further, by adding a classic supply and demand 2nd order effect on top of it. But first, I’m going to make a few changes…

· Fox / rabbit system replaced by human / mammoth, since mammoths were a non-renewable resource relative to the human reproductive cycle.
· Let’s say mammoths aren’t found everywhere, only in valleys, and the number of mammoths in a valley is proportional to the valley size.

So let’s start with the first isolated human population in valley #1, that discovers a way to kill mammoths for the first time. Their population explodes and peaks when mammoth numbers fall-off to a critical point. Some hungry cave man decides it might be worthwhile climbing over the mountain to see if he can find some more mammoths. He discovers valley #2, which has more mammoths than valley #1 originally had. A 2nd order peak in human population beings, as valley #1 continues to deplete and harvesting of mammoths in valley #2 begins.

Using the model above, one can imagine long periods of time, where cavemen put less effort into finding new valleys, because current mammoth discoveries provide mammoths in excess of human consumption, until the human population increases to a critical level.

The human population would continue to go through 2nd order increases and decreases, with an apparent 1st order exponential growth trend, until the biggest valley with the largest mammoth population was found and depleted. Only at this point, in hind site, would it become apparent to the average caveman that mammoths were a non-renewable resource and they’d better put some effort into finding a replacement food source. Whether or not peak caveman population was tied to peak mammoth production, would depend on whether or not the (hopefully) yet-to-be discovered food source could provide the same calorie density per unit effort as mammoths.

Did I pass the test?

like trying to convince someone that their god is not the true god

But when it comes to the god of the "wise and free marketplace", that is exactly what we need to do.

Otherwise we are all doomed.

Recall however, that our current monotheistic religions began with someone (e.g. Abraham) trying to convince idol worshipers that there idols are false and that the Invisible White Bearded Rabbit is the real thing instead?

Debbie, first of all apologies if you felt included in the "politicians" category - I wasn't thinking of you when writing my little piece!!! If all politicians were like you, the world would be a very different place.

But you are perfectly right to say that politicians are not more stupid than anybody else. There is Sturgeon's law that says that 99.9% of everything is crap. And Peter's principle that says that people rise to their level of incompetence and stay there. These laws apply to politicians as well as to university professors. No evidence that professors are smarter than politicians - perhaps the opposite is closer to truth. Actually, professors have a capability of muddling issues with appropriately academic gobbledigook that is unrivalled in any category on this planet, except perhaps lawyers. Trying to explain peak oil to a professor can be much worse than to a politician.

Anyway, I emphasized the concept of trying to explain peak oil to politicians as the result of a personal frustration with the political debate as it is here, in Italy. But I subscribe completely to your statement "the public sucks". Absolutely.

I think we can apply (with some changes) my model to the public/politicians relationship. Politicians are predators, the public are the prey. Now, of course, politicians don't eat the public (although, sometimes, I have this sort of feeling that maybe, given some special circumstances.........), But they are predators of the public's minds. They absorb the public's fears and feed back these fears to the public. That is a positive feedback that makes a few issues grow out of control and shuts off the debate on everything else. There is a basic problem with the way "mass media" work.

Eventually, politicians mirror the public and the public mirror politicians. Our politicians can't solve our problems for us. Nor can the public. And so, what do we do? Oh, well......

I'm more than willing to cut George Carlin some slack he was a great comedian!

However when a politician stands up and says "'The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.'" Then I have a problem with that. It sounds exactly like the arrogant stereotype we have come to expect our politicians to conform to.

OK, defense rests. Now all you politician/government haters, tell me how stupid I am...

Foreperson addressing the court: Your Honor the jury has reached a verdict.

Judge to Jury: Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, Is this your verdict?

Jurors respond: Yes, your Honor.

The Foreperson hands the court clerk the verdict...

Court Clerk reading: We find the Politician guilty on all counts!

Debbie,You have got your head on nice and straight.

Another way of expressing Carlin's point is to say we get the government we deserve.

If you present a "liberal" position to a "conservative" dressed as a conservative idea ,the conservatives will embrace it like a long lost favorite child.

Ditto the liberals.

But everybody in an advantageous position is sure that if things change he will lose,and so we manage to turn lots of win -wins into LESS THAN zero sum games because not only do we get no change-we expend a lot of effort fighting to make sure there will be none.

I'm too tired right now to put up and explain a good example but someday soon when the subject turns to politics again I will.

Hi Ugo. Thanks for that easily digestible foray into portraying peak oil. If we take this to the global, human scale, we can see that the predator (mankind) has just about devoured all the prey (Earth's resources). I also think that we would get some interesting correlations if we paired mankind off with other essential resources, like water, arable land, fisheries, forests, and biodiversity. These would even make the most lame minded politician peek over his glasses, be them reading, or containing spirits.

Yes, Drillo, Carrara marble shows the same behavior as oil: the best quality is extracted first. In the case of oil quality is defined as EROEI, in the case of marble as other properties; color, purity, etc. The interesting thing is that, while we can substitute oil with other energy sources (I think it is the meaning of the world "fungible") there is no substitute for good marble. Once it is broken/cut/used it is gone forever. Or, at least, for the geological time it will take to make it again.

Hubbert had a true scientific mind. He was well aware of his predictive limitations. According to the late L. F. Buz Ivanhoe (personal communication), Hubbert made no true predictions for world peak oil. He did make projections using assumptions for total endowment - the commonly used 2 Trillion barrel estimate for example. He was pressured for predictions from various publications, including Scientific American, which may have led to misinterpretations. His US prediction was for the lower 48 states and included no estimate for Alaska or Federal water. Michael C. Lynch has expressed differing views - both on the USENET during the 90's and more recently on Yahoo energyresources and elsewhere.

Well peak capacity ala peak cheap oil was pretty much right on target around 2000.

Production numbers or total production estimates much after 2003 when wall the space capacity was brought online are dubious at best flagrant lies at worst.

In any case because of spare capacity issues peak oil production and the true peak are not simultaneous. For global production I like to think of it as a peak band extending from 1995 to 2005 where productive capacity ability to expand production and actual production changed overtime. Somewhere in this band was a maximum in total possible production without good numbers 2000 is as good a guess as any. And given that regardless of the model one would expect both the decline or increasing rate on both sides of peak to be small the actual peak year is not all that important.

Next because of the existance of both spare capacity and also production that could readily be brought online within a 2-3 years or so via infield drilling or acceleration of the development of known fields. One would expect the true peak to be more like a lambs shift and occur when prices reach their minima not maxima since this represent fairly well the maximum capacity which is whats important when production capacity is higher than the production rate.

Of course prices have inflation etc issues but looking here.

http://inflationdata.com/inflation/images/char/Oil/Inflation_Adj_Oil_Pri...

Oil prices bottomed in about 1998 well inline with peak being about that time.

Thus its fairly safe to put peak oil at 1998-2000.

Now actual production will continue to rise after the real peak but this is just eroding spare capacity and near term capacity as current production declines. The final maximum in production is significantly lower than what could have been obtained at peak. Probably to the tune of 10-20mbd lower.
If we had actually produced at the oil when we hit peak I suspect most people would agree we would have been closer to 90mbd or even 100mbd. If you dig just a bit you will realize the present production level is much lower then what we could have hit in the 1990 and early 2000 if demand existed.

Its not hard to deduce that peak oil is well in the past if you just look.

It was hidden somewhat by spare capacity issues and above ground demand but its fairly obviously there. Later sharp price increases with marginal production increases should make it obvious that we had already passed peak oil at that point.

Now this does not tell us what future production is going to look like both the shark fin model and a smeared long peak from a symmetric model coupled with production below capacity at peak give about the same answers for the initial production post peak as both produce a plateau. Its only when you come off the plateau that they being to diverge. Regardless both models are centered well back in the past sometime between 1997 and 2000 the common symmetric peak models presented on the oil drum with peak around now are simply wrong.

Most of those are contaminated by seriously incorrect additions to total URR made in the late 1980's to 1990's. This rubbish makes everything look good and self consistent but its just a case of GIGO.

Now the reasons that URR claims expanded had to do with better technology yet this actually suggests that the shark fin model is the correct one as both discovery rates and production rates where accelerated over time.

In any case one has to look beyond raw production and URR data to deduce what the post peak production curve might look like. Indeed we have other data in the form of price and demand that help us guess the curve.

First in the symetric case with excess production one could easily assume that it would become somewhat asymmetric as prices increased and that either way production decline would be gradual. The price curve from this sort of production model would be a slow linear increase in price. With long plateau or shallow stair steps perhaps. No spike in prices is predicted or warranted.

On the demand side simple conservation as the price increases is more than enough to balance supply and demand or even cause a surplus leading to falling prices. In general conservation should be able to handle a fairly static oil supply with ease for many years. No spikes and no reason for spikes even in our ponzi scheme economy as it would be unable to really diverge for long from intrinsic oil production levels. You get a sort of bumpy plateau or sort of long linear increase. Now of course we have a ponzi scheme economy so you get bubbles in other areas such as technology or housing but oil prices would not really follow these bubbles outside of inflation effects. Once inflation is removed the prices would be flat. And thats really about it decline rates are low and conservation efforts and recessions should eventually result in the economy having plenty of time to adjust to constrained oil supplies and they don't change much i.e 2-3% at most per year.

Now on to the fast collapse model since its identical with the peak/capacity model up through when production starts to collapse they are the same. However they do differ significantly once production collapse starts. And right here its import to note that the collapse is effectively synchronous occuring pretty much the same worldwide. I'll come back to that.

However the economics of fast collapse are quite different since you have to blow the bubble bigger and faster as collapse starts. Assuming oil production started to collapse back about 2003 then you get good aggrement with the bubble and in fact you use the onset of the last bubble to determine the start of collapse as price is part of the signal. Both the last bubble and sharply rising oil prices happen at the same time and signal oil production has started to acclerate its decline rate.

In retrospect I realized that this would also result in a sort of first peak in prices this occurs right before the ponzi economy goes through and initial collapse in part because of high oil prices in part from simply being driven to hard. In any case the base model predicts a price spike up the front side with no reason for it to decrease while the addition of a ponzi scheme causes collapse or a true spike.

However given oil production is rapidly falling the period where production exceeds demand is very short and prices will quickly begin rising in our case only six months passed.

The importance of the spike is not so much in its timing and occurence as it in my opinion a signal of fast decline or shark fin collapse.

And next the beauty of the model is it predicts collapse is synchronous i.e if you read my hunter post with collapse starts its across all regions. This is important since about 45% of the world oil is produced from oil super giant fields if you get a single well documented case of one giant collapsing it means all of them are collapsing within a year or so. For the pure model its simultaneous real world will give a bit of fuzz. Now the reason this is cool is we have a well documented collapse case in the form of Canterell we don't need any other information for this model. We have the spike ponzi blowup and a giant collapse thats all thats needed to prove the model. The next prediction is a rapid return to high prices quickly reaching and surpassing the previous peak. As the global economy simply does not have much bubble left to pop you don't get the sharp declines. Production is falling fast enough that conservation can also do little to ameliorate prices. If it could have then you would not have quickly returned to rising prices in the first place after collapse. And you would not have gotten a spike or been on this curve etc.

Mini pops are possible but given the big one only dropped prices for six months later pops will be less effective say a three month pull back then none. So at best you might see a peak prices pull back for say three months then go to new highs. After this the timing is so short that its lost in random market noise.
But your in general looking at new highs every 3-4 months or so until final economic collapse.

Given the speed of fast collapse which I've put at 8-12mbd or so lost annually for the only remaining prediction of the model to come true we need to beat the 2008 high within the next six months. By then decreased demand can no longer cover falling production. If not then I've got the model wrong and will just have to wait to figure out the real one however the other choice is symmetric but then the price spike has to be almost purely a financial phenomena having nothing to do with fundamentals. Thats actually the claim but I really don't buy it. I might just have to accept it one day but its still very troublesome.
But we can and will bubble any market so perhaps a way to bubble oil was found and exploited on top of the general financial bubble. However again no way oil prices would have bounced back given that they would have been in the toilet for years after the initial collapse not only would the financial bubble be blown but real demand is lower. Its absolutely impossible to reinflate. Heck look at the housing bubble and a massive government intervention has only resulted in a brief pause in the slide. No way crafty traders can jump back in and pump oil esp with the physical glut.

Now before talking about production claims after about 2000 there is another and more troublesome issue which is rising tanker rates. I'd argue that these are at first glance damming evidence that the model is wrong and really sink it. Initially I believed the rising production numbers because they were consistent with rising tanker rates which where consistent with other shipping rates.

The key to understanding what happened in shipping actually lies in the fact that shipping rates where going up across the board for all types not just tankers and the big driver was rapidly rising bunker fuel prices not demand.

So the basic behavior is to practice whats called slow steaming once your on contract you conserve as much fuel as possible to maximize profits. Next you almost certainly make use of the futures markets to fix fuel costs. As further bunker prices increase your insulated in your hedge window making even more money. Indeed if rates don't increase fast enough you actually make more money not excepting any cargo and just collecting your winnings in the futures market.

Airlines played a very similar game with a vengeance till it blew up. I suspect it was being played across all transport networks. Conserve fuel to the point of refusing contracts and collecting money from the futures market.

Obviously this means a lot of the sharp increases in transportation costs had nothing to do with increases in shipping volumes indeed it leads to people excepting full price to even ship on a partially loaded ship both oil and container ships. So not only is shipping supply being artificially withheld in many cases because of the delay the ships when they finally sailed did not sail with a full load. In some cases certainly full or even overloaded.

Now on to oil tankers specifically there is another important factor as oil supplies fall and local storage gets depleted you move to the final product market to bolster your own production in the cases of countries without refining capacity you by a cargo on the spot market regardless of where it is in the world paying the cost. And again in all cases even accepting partial loading to get something.

So for tankers this means more tankers where cleaned and moved into the final product shipping market and out of crude. In general instead of shipping crude to its destination and the products getting refined and distributed internally via pipeline rail or truck you had the crude shipped to a refinery and a good bit of the product loaded onto another tanker and shipped elswhere in the world.

Worst case you needed twice as many tankers as before one to ship to the refinery and one to ship refined product. And of course cleaning tankers is non trivial so you have added delay from the cleaning process. Desperate customers paid and paid and paid so who cares.

Next for the US Mexico production was declining and the US was chartering tankers with significantly longer transit times from Africa or the middle east so again you have yet one more factor leading towards higher rates without increased production.

And last but not least you also have a mandated move to double hull tankers with single hull tankers being phased out along many trade routes. This not only leads to competition for double hulls but also for single hull tankers accepting circuitous routes as long as the customer paid. Throw in a healthy dose of slow steaming and all is well.

What all this really describes is your typical cluster traffic jam like situation when you have desperate customers. As long as they pay the actually efficiency of transport declines dramatically its just a shell game and under the covers the total volume of raw crude actually delivered can decline dramatically before it collapses.

In fact the sharp collapse in shipping rates following the collapse of the ponzi scheme economy indicates that the cluster f@c!k model for global shipping during the period of rapid price increases is valid. Otherwise as oil prices started increasing spurring further increases in oil production rates would have rapidly rebounded. Also of course single hull tankers are being scrapped and as new ships are brought on the least efficient fleet members can be used as floating storage. Reasonably credible reports of significant floating storage should have also put a hard floor under rates.

As and example in housing you had bidding wars driving up prices for houses even as there was and obvious supply glut and more on the horizon. The frenzy lasts well past when the market has obviously turned as long as the frenzy itself is able to disrupt the efficiency of the system and make it inefficient.

And last but not least using tankers for floating storage maybe sailing slowly also removed supply.

Overall there are a number of very valid reasons to see how tanker rates can increase even as supplies fell.

The last question and most troublesome one lies with absolute tanker counts coming out of the Persian Gulf. At this end a few things become important.
One is of course here.

http://www.country-data.com/cgi-bin/query/r-11616.html

KSA has its own extensive tanker fleet. Next of course ships ship weight not volume lower crude grades are significantly heavier than the lights grade so the volume drops as the oil gets heavier.

Next as far as I can tell the heavier NGL's are shipped in either tankers similar to oil or the same as oil tankers. I'm researching the topic but also it seems they can be added to crude as a diluent for pipeline shipping although I have no information of this process is used for ships. I have a open question as to how NGL's are shipped. This is important because to date I have no reason to not believe NGL production has not been steadily increasing and it should esp in the ME as gas caps are blown down on dead fields.

Its far from clear if tanker counting takes into account the nature of the cargo and quality of oil and even loading level. Changes in these variables can lead to a significant deviation in the volume of real crude oil shipped.

And of course many of these countries don't have enough refining capacity and export land model is in full force leading to increased product inflows even if outgoing tanker traffic is increasing. The net is declining from export land.

Regardless at the end of the day even with all of this I'm left looking at KSA's tanker fleet and concluding that if the Shark Fin model is correct and my timing is correct then to finally bring the entire past to closure there must have been some significant amount of subtrefuge with one big tanker owner and big oil exporter that happened to be a big tanker owner.

Indeed in the end for my model to be correct on top of everything else someone had to play a very blatant game with the tanker trackers sending out partially loaded or even tankers full of seawater and setting low in the water to fake oil shipments. No matter how I run the numbers I feel like some fake shipments must be needed to bring everything into line.

This shocking conclusion also has a interesting result if your running a lot of fake oil shipments then if the price collapses you can cut these back and "drop production". I came to this conclusion that not all the traffic coming out of the gulf could be real back in 2008 the KSA lead cutback simply reinforces this conclusion since in my model they would have no way to cut back much less increase.

Now what really interesting is we have had reports surface that Ghawar had already declined in production by up to 2mbd several years ago I believe it was 2006 or so.

In any case whats striking is my model actually suggests that these are true and Ghawar has already suffered a significant decline. TSHTF if you will and in a sense we missed it of course 140 dollar a barrel oil does not seem to be enough to convince people something is seriously wrong so ...

In any case by adding the assumption that Ghawar has already declined significantly and that KSA is actually playing games with tankers I can get everything to fit. As and aside they also probably are seriously abusing export land by claiming a 3.5% increase in internal consumption this is fairly increadible and not even close to other documented increases in consumption regardless of the price of oil. Nigeria for example does not come close and it should at least be similar for price driven export land.

But games where played.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/NIGERIA+-+The+Local+Oil+Market.-a0166943581

In any case rising imports into KSA maybe even hidden to some extent in partially loaded tankers could also work to cover the real situation. Indeed the simplest way to play the game is to send the tanker out fully loaded then either just offload say in the Red Sea and run the pipeline in reverse periodically. Needless to say plenty of ways to play a shell game are possible.

And last but not least this is pretty damming of course technically is a huge issue how on earth did they pull it off ?

Well with all lies it probably started small and grew overtime into a whopper however the real problem is the EIA effectively went along with the ruse probably initially because they don't have any way to check data so at first it was a GIGO problem however at some point given what I'm claiming it simply became to large to hide we are talking about 2mbd at least of fake traffic if not more. Sooner or later you can't hide it.

Now lets just guess that the EIA caught on and confronted KSA infact GWB would have flown down personally to discuss the issue with his pal the king. Now however you have a very interesting situation. If KSA comes clean and tells the world its been lying its ass off and its real production is significantly less the EIA and US look like fools and the world goes crazy esp with oil at 140 a barrel. There are weapons of mass destruction in the ME but not in Iraq they are in KSA.

Now of course the US is pissed and forces KSA to empty its strategic product storage and send it all to the US along with effectively paying tribute from here on out. The US has no choice but to pull the plug on the global economy setting of a collapse that almost got out of control as it screwed Bear Stearns and Lehman both deeply involved in the oil trade. The real insiders knowing the true game took advantage of this and the hurricanes messing up gulf imports to amass a huge floating storage position of real oil and start a oil bank. The US continued to muscle the futures markets and probably started serious interventions via massive cash infusions to allow certain ahem (GS) players to rig the stock and oil markets.

Despite all of this the oil prices still started increasing steadily quickly after the big one as the basic model predicts. No of course we are looking at another price spike. A faux economic recovery has been blatantly rigged to blame rising prices on recovery and the stopping of fake oil shippments provided cover for OPEC cutbacks. This works so well its hard to believe that the US and KSA did not work on this together. Thats not to say some muscle is not being used but even though the EIA may have been duped its not clear if the CIA or other agencies and higher powers don't know the truth.

It does not matter since pulling the plug did not work the collapse is simply to fast further spin is not going to do much good. This suggest of course that a new game will eventually have to be played fairly soon. Four obvious ones that are brewing are all wars either in Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela or Iran.
Thus if the model is right one can suspect that this time around shortly after oil makes new highs war will break out effecting a significant oil exporting nation. Which one is probably not known yet the US is in position to handle war in all but Nigeria which would probably involve the EU.

So if you read down to here and don't have your tinfoil hat on thats your problem :) Whats interesting is the only physical lie needed is KSA playing tanker games then everything else works.

IMO, the HL method gives us a decent estimate for the URR from mature basins. I used it in early 2006 to warn of an impending problem with net oil exports, focusing on the top three net oil exporters.

In January, 2006, I thought that Norway would continue to show declining production; no surprise there (although I think that CERA and the EIA disagreed, and as someone else noted, if they can't get the North Sea right, why would we expect them to get more complex regions right, but I digress). After conferring with Sam, I thought that Russia would resume its production decline within one to two years and I thought that Saudi Arabia was on the verge of a production decline. The Russian data presents some problems, which we addressed by using the production data through about 1984 to forecast future production. Note that from 2002 to 2005, combined Saudi and Russian total liquids production had increased at an annual rate of change of +8.1%/year, with net oil exports showing a +8.9%/year rate of change (EIA).

In any case, here is what the EIA subsequently showed for the (2005) top three net oil exporters, relative to recent production peaks, which may or may not be final production peaks:

Saudi Arabia (2005-2008)
-1.0%/year (Prod.) & -2.7%/year (Net Oil Exports)
Con: +6.4%/year

Russia (2007-2008)
-0.9%year (Prod.) & -2.4%/year (Net Oil Exports)
Con: +2.8%/year

Norway (2001-2008)
-4.7%/year (Prod.) & -5.1%/year (Net Oil Exports)
Con: +0.2%/year

As implied above, the wild card is production from immature basins, and this is especially a factor in Russia, but I suspect that the Russian frontier basins are to Russia as Alaska is to the US, i.e., helpful, but no panacea.

Yes, now we are getting to some common ground and we agree on the math. Then, it is true that this is a deterministic model. You see this as a defect, and I understand why. It depends, of course, on what you are trying to do with the model. As I said, this is a simple model that is mainly conceived as a way for human minds to grasp something that, otherwise, is a bit alien to most people. Then, what is the predictive value of the model? This I can't really estimate at the present stage. My feeling is that if you can fit TWO curves instead of one, as most models do (e.g. Hubbert linearization) then this model model is more robust and it might (just might) estimate URRs more reliably than other models. But the future is inherently uncertain. URRs are what we will decide URR will be. As I said in another comment, the models assume that humans are not smarter than bacteria. But, in reality, they are; at least a bit! So, we may decide to engage everything we have in extracting every drop of oil from the earth and that would change the model. That may be described adding other parameters or, for instance, modifying K2 as the model runs (I think this is what you mean). It is possible and I think it has value. My impression is that we badly need "mind sized" ways to understand this behavior. It is, eventually, the basic approach of system dynamics: deterministic model, but a range of them

Who funded Darwin?

The capitalist system that made his family independently wealthy. He never had to earn a living and had enough funds to do his own studies and research.

The late L.F Buz (aka Buzz) Ivanhoe self funded his research. He had retired, following a long career in the oil industry and was concerned about the availability of petroleum. .
He published in the Oil and Gas J. during the 80's. Later he decided to fund The Hubbert Center Newsletter, spending well over a million dollars and several years of his time. Much of the research performed by Jean Laherrere and other experts has also been self funded. Continuing the tradition some of the peak oil research being carried out at TOD and ASPO remains self funded. The expertise of many of the posters also adds an element of peer review.

http://hubbert.mines.edu

They changed Islam-it used to be "If s--t happens, take a hostage".

In general people can't visualize what happens when you have varying search rates. The varying search rates cause the "downhill" acceleration; search is actually accelerating still, its just that many of the fast searches have all completed, and the formerly slow ones are now starting. This is all in the context of a constrained environment. Contrary to what many people believe, this is not your traditional feedback loop.

I agree that Roman law was a bit of a elxir if you will creating taxpayers out of barbarians and dusty lands as you call it.

I think in the case of Rome the fat tail is the growth of ever wealthier taxpayers overtime as the integrate more fully into the empire along of course with continously bringing in new future taxpayers.

My best guess is it probably took close to 100 years or so to fully romanize a region after it was conquered and to a large extent this also meant pushing back the border so it was safely inside the Roman empire and not dealing with large troop concentrations. Regions initially become well inside the border.

So the fat tail is a mix of rising wealth internally as new regions are incorporated and adding new regions.

This does a good job of picking out a sort of natural timescale for Roman expansion that fits well with history. Assuming a generation is 20 years it I'm saying it takes about five generations to fully incorporate a region. Three to remove the barbaric influence and culturally incorporate one transition and then one expanding romanized generation. After this your probably looking at and additional say three generations before your reaching maximum wealth so say 150 years or so to max.

As a completely different factor that suggests these are the corrent time scales one can look at the conversion of the Roman empire to Christianity which is a very similar sort of basic cultural conversion.

http://www.unrv.com/culture/christianity.php

It took almost 300 years before the full conversion was pretty much done i.e the Emperor became Christian. But it suggest my time scale for simpler less revolutionary changes is probably not a bad guess. You can see this today where many different cultures readily adopt technology and business practices while religion and culture is difficult to change.

This might be a good book to get time scales from.

http://www.yalebooks.co.uk/yale/display.asp?K=9780300137538&sf1=author&s...

Of course starting with better documented civilization say America may be easier to refine the methods. The conversion of immigrants to taxpayers is fairly well documented for the US. The timescale is shorter it seems to take only two or three generations say 2.5 to fully convert a free soul to a indebted taxpayer but the basic concept is still there.

Of course the interesting part in my opinion is not this process but where it goes astray and the entire system begins to excessively steal from the future for today its when the balance shifts and dispersive like forces get swamped thats the interesting part. As far as I can tell it looks like for quite a while that dispersion is still at play even as another force is actually the root.

They look very very similar for quite a while. Its really hard to tell even for the US when we went from organic growth to decline as the measures of growth are simply changed. The way data is collected and valued changes dramatically while the overall numbers continue to look good. As a simple example in the US the way unemployment is calculated is fiddled with constantly. We now have U3 U6 etc etc. As far as I can tell the turning point actually occurs when simple easy obvious stats are turned into convoluted definitions. Its when the obfuscation of the truth starts that the system has already flipped to a shark fin like collapse model and simple dispersive forces are weakening.

This is easy to understand for humans but it also holds for example for very simple systems such as sand piles. The stresses and strains throughout the system are very very similar at the point of collapse as they are before. The lie if you will can be subtle and not obvious and almost in detectable but its there and its of course powerful since collapse occurs shortly thereafter.

In the case of a sand pile its of course a change in the distribution of stress and strain over the pile. Its more a pattern then any significant change in the physical variable if you can see the stress/strain relationship then the pattern change is obvious while simply measuring the forces at the grain level completely misses the truth.

This is actually my semi argument with WHT you can't ignore this macro pattern effect even as the fundamentals don't seem to vary. One of the changes actually fundamentally altered the time evolution of the system from symmetric to asymmetric collapse.

For oil the culprit is three fold better imaging technology, horizontal drilling and the way reserves are calculated. The combination of all three has resulted in wildly inflated reserve numbers that are now industry standard.

Its not all that subtle for oil.

The intrinsic trick if you will and ROCKMAN points it out is since you can image a thin layer of oil and drill a horizontal well you can make up almost any number you want for reserves. They are only barely constrained but actual production numbers and have little physical meaning these days.
The truth is hidden in the fact that horizontal wells have a large number of problems over their productive lifetime and tend to last far shorter than projected. The fact that they are generally profitable completely hides the real physical situation or no one cares since they made money over the short term longer term you go bankrupt and never produce the claimed oil but thats a different issue. In the end its simple fraud and fraud is based on hiding liabilities. Its not rocket science once system starts to play hide the liability or fraud its shark finned collapse time.

EDIT:

The reason this works is the onset of fraud follows the original real dispersive model and thats how it becomes successful. Its a chimera of the true underly dispersion and becomes a charade. They the beauty of the game you can't see it unless you pull back and recognize the pattern and find the intrinsic trick thats the basis of the fraud. Ponzi schemes are obvious other frauds less so. Its actually a concentrator or negative dispersion but it looks positive on the outside.