Some news items from back last year say BHP Billiton were considering drilling more wells. Can't find much news since.

Btw, I slightly corrected November production up to 14,374 bpd in an edit as I must have miss added before. Not that it matters much.

Hi jeffrey, my understanding is that the shut-in is a pipeline related issue. No doubt though the shut-in will serve other purposes

Yes, I wrote on Ghawar. My web page on it is almost always within the top five on Google searches. This week, when I showed a friend that page, it was #2 behind wikipedia. I was pleased.

BP, bummed pelican

toilforoil,
Obama's relationship with the press and media in general has been unique. No one will ask him really tough questions. It's a love affair with the press that I've never seen before, not even with John Kennedy. I don't think anynone except the far right blames him for anything. President Obama will not be hurt by anything that occurs in his term of office. He made five million dollars off of book sales last year. He will do well. I'm not politically modivated and I don't know the spawn of satan. I do know the evil wretches are those who pretend to lead us. The more you care about a political leader the more disappointed you be when you realize they are just front men. Those that pull the strings are not seen.
hotrod

I know. Just not this much.

WHT, Yes, that was my reaction. There's no way memmel can back calculate oil consumption from CO2 rise. There are even more factors feeding into atmospheric CO2 than you have listed. Agriculture and forestry cause CO2 emissions too.

Your wrong about being able to deconvolve certainly you can.

How exactly do you intend to remove the uncertainty in the other three sources?

Right there your already fundamentally wrong about what I did. In fact I make it pretty clear what I'm doing and why. I'm not concerned about uncertainty in measurement I'm concerned about systematic error or simply bald faced lying your ass off.

Your completely wrong in assuming that uncertainty in the data is the issue I've written often enough that thats not the issue the real data is well known and well understood we are simply told a lie and its huge.

The public data for oil is effectively completely fake its trivial to split out this forgery from real data that has no intrinsic political reason to be forged and plenty of supporting secondary sources that more than support the general values for coal and NG consumption.

Indeed I have no real problem with our ability to collect excellent data in regards to coal oil and NG consumption and production and even decent reserve numbers for oil. The data exists and for NG and coal there has been no strong reason to alter the data for political gains as generally both are readily available and abundant.

Not so for oil and as I said we are not talking about error but significant blatant political lying.

Just like I figured, there is no model, only a failed attempt at a clever tautology to separate it from the empirical data itself.

Again your wrong I've modeled as well as you can model the situation given the constraints and given the unknowns. Oil reserves in excess of 1.2 -1.5 trillion barrels are highly questionable up to that level is well supported with plenty of data and reserve estimates made decades before there was any reason to alter them for political gain. Using C02 data that you dismiss I can create a consumption curve consistent with this URR. The only open question is our production levels are surprisingly high given our depletion level of remaining reserves. However technical advances especially horizontal drilling and water/gas injection (secondary recovery) are sufficient to support such high production levels against a dwindling reserve base. This can be readily seen at the field level where production at 70% depletion is the same as at 10%. Modern technology allows for a long plateau. The assumption that oil production can be modeled using the central limit theorem rests on shaky ground as oil production is dominated by a handful of fields a few hundred at best. Next we have several examples of giant fields declining rapidly in the public domain. And last but not least we have your work which highlights the fat tail effect. Which I'm also fine at least with the general model its predictions simply suffer GIGO.

The final result is the best model given the circumstances lacking transparent access to oil data reconstruction of oil consumption from C02 data indicates that oil production claims are almost certainly highly distorted for political reasons. Reasonably trustworthy estimates for reserves from when the bulk of discoveries where in the past yet before political corruption of the data are sufficient to support the production profile deduced from the C02 data given technical advances little more is needed. Indeed we have not made a discovery rivaling those of the 1960's and before since.

The result is fairly simple to connect future production with current production levels given a 1.2-1.5 trillion barrel URR requires a period of rapid decline in production especially given it has to match up with a long fat tail period of potential production in the future. This requires that most of our current sources of production have to be at the brink of exhaustion. Even if we assume and additional 0.5 trillion barrels of oil in the fat tail region which is probably correct if not exactly important as it extends over decades. The production rate in the fat tail region is still 50% of the current production level and you have to connect the transition and the oil needed to do this via some sort of gentle decline literally does not exist.

The exact production profile over this transition period is simply impossible to model the timing of the collapse of the the giant and super giant fields plays a critical role in the production profile. Next the end of discovery of smaller rapidly exhausted fields that last less than a decade plays a large role in the actual value. The magnitude of decline is on the order of 30 mbd and the period has to be a decade or less.

Thats pretty easy to figure if the fat tail gives us a production level of around 40mbd for several decades or about 14GB a year into 500 GB for about 30 years and we are at about 30GB a year right now and down to our last 100 GB or so of reserves that can be extracted at a rapid rate then the transition from 30 to 14 has to occur over a period of years.

This is simply a problem of the boundary conditions if you will giving a certain result. Brutal yes but then the question becomes can you dismiss the result ?

The result I've gotten so far is no you cannot no approach I've tried can eliminate this gap. Indeed the flagrant political distortion of the data on oil production that I've uncovered suggests that this gap is real.

And last but not least I suggested several months ago that if I'm right then you will see the truth in the next six months.

I could care less about how much you deride my approach that mean nothing whats important is that the divergence if you will happens now. If I'm right then TSHTF right now.

Now again understand the actual change and rate of change during this period is basically unpredictable all you know is that it flattens out into a long tail over the next few years however given all the data I watch concerning short term oil production the result continues to come back that oil production is declining rapidly now perhaps 2-4mbd over a year which could be 1mbd every four months.
But it could still be as low as 1mbd per year nothing prevents it from being that low and nothing prevents it from being higher the exact number as I said is in the details of when individual giant fields begin steep decline and is thus by its nature impossible to predict.

However it does not really matter there are only so many ways to connect a 50% drop in production over a decade or less the number of physically reasonable ways is even smaller and its just variant of linear collapse with a few different slopes.

The fact its effectively impossible to model this period thus does not matter all that much as there simply are not all that many choices to make. Turns out I actually biffed it a bit till I got the C02 data but once I understood what it meant then the corrected model actually makes a lot more sense than my abrupt cliff conjecture tainted by published production numbers that claim a long plateau right now. The experimental result is far more reasonable and sensible. It still means we need a second much steeper decline period to get everything connected but it introduces a much more physically sensible spread into the data. Its still effectively a cliff but now I can see it has enough of a slope that its a lot more reasonable the original model required some incredible correlation. Not that that some fairly tight correlation is not there with whole swarms of fields going into decline practically simultaneously but its no longer so short that its difficult for even me to believe. Regardless this grace period with a more reasonable physical spread and fairly low decline rate is in the past and correlation has increased dramatically over this period. Indeed once its introduced and you have a generally high priced oil production period it actually induced the correlation required for the follow on more rapid collapse phase.

Gail, I have thought for more than a decade about what will happen as the oil age ends. I don't think we will gradually go down. I think it will be a sudden shut down. We will probably go to war over the last 1/3 of the reserves. And that will mean that the last 1/3 of the world's oil will not be used to the betterment of the human condition. It will be burned in the wars.

Why? Because humans have this nasty habit of saying, "If I can't have it, then neither can you!"

I can think of some counter-examples. Though they involve dictatorial powers. In WWII Imperial Japan, the USSR, and Nazi Germany all suffered huge decreases in available energy. Yet they all stayed organized and their populaces worked very hard to compensate for the losses of energy.

I'm not saying that military dictatorships are necessary once Peak Oil starts tearing the guts out of our economies. But we ought to at least seriously entertain the question of what kind of political organization is needed to deal with yearly declines in available oil of 2,3,4,5,6%. At what decline rate do the metaphorical wheels fall off of a market economy?

I am thinking that a number of measures short of dictatorship could be used to enable a more orderly and less steep decline:

- Staff up bankruptcy courts to enable bankruptcies to be speedy. Transfer of assets from stock holders to bond holders will allow organizations to survive in shrunken state rather than collapse entirely. Lots of restructurings under bankruptcy will be needed. Time will be of the essence.

- Write national laws on handling state and provincial government bankruptcies. It is my impression that US states, for example, do not have bankruptcy law for them. Also, as Vallejo California's trip thru bankruptcy shows, the courts do not have clear direction on such matters as pension handling of bankrupt government entities. The bankruptcy laws for corporations are much more mature than the bankruptcy laws of governments. The EU is similarly ill-equipped as its handling of the Greek crisis demonstrates.

- Loosen up laws for allowing very small cars and scooters on the road. People are going to need to be able to downshift to small electric vehicles in a hurry. Some jurisdictions are already pretty good on this. But others need improvement.

- Allow very small small room hotels patterned after the very small box hotels in Japan. This will allow workers to cheaply stay near their workplace during the week and make trips home only on weekends. The ability to rapidly switch to using such accommodations will enable more rapid adjustment during the crisis.

- Force reductions in consumer energy usage that are steeper than the overall decline in energy availability and channel the freed up energy toward creating new wind turbines, nukes, geothermal generation facilities, and other capital plant for generation energy.

Thanks. My brain feels better now. I figured there was a small possibility that I was going insane.

Let's try it this way. If you don't trust the oil statistics, I can't for the life of me imagine why you'd trust the coal statistics either.

You have a very limited imagination if you can't even "for the life of" you think of any reasons why oil production stats might be more subject to political/national security manipulation at certain points in history (including now) than gas and coal. Although my imagination, if I run down Memmel's path in a "what if", would suggest that coal and gas figures would likely themeselves become more tainted in the end-game.

There are two problems: 1. the CEO, 2. the people beneath him.

One reason I never wanted to go higher than exploration director was that in the rarified atmosphere of the top offices, people don't talk with you, and if they do, they tell you what you WANT to hear, not necessarily the truth, and then you go out and say things that aren't true. This doesn't absolve any CEO of the responsibility or even of engaging in truth twisting, but reality is bringing bad news to any CEO is a risky affair so the underlings play the role of the enabler to the CEO's wishes that all is fine. After all, what underling wants to lose his position because he was the proverbial messenger?

I will say this, one of the things that made my rise through the ranks slower than lots of others was that I would tell the truth as I saw it (I could be very wrong and was on occasion). People don't like the truth if it has bad implications(look at how long it has taken peak oil to become mainstream among governments). When it became obvious to one and all that that misbehaving field, of which I spoke, had serious problems, two vice presidents came to Aberdeen to view the situation. I was one of the first people they wanted to speak with because I had a reputation for independence and telling people what I thought of things. That was good in a catastrophic situation, but bad if you want to be a vice president.

Well, thanks for both. I guess with a number of leases, it probably makes sense to download the full dataset, and just sort out what you want.

Thanks.

It is a huge database. Glenn sent me his spreadsheet, to help with formatting of graphs. We discovered he had to delete the un-summarized data, to get the spreadsheet size down to something that could be e-mailed.