Empirically, IMO the HL technique works best for large producing regions with serious production, about two mbpd or so, for a significant period of time, about two decades or so.  

There are two reasons to do a HL analysis, to estimate recoverable reserves and to develop a model for the world.  

IMO, the two "cleanest" HL models for the world are the Lower 48 and the total North Sea--largely unencumbered production by private companies.  

The Lower 48 peaked at slightly less than 50% in 1970, the North Sea at slightly more than 50% in 1999.   Note that the top 10 major oil companies working the North Sea, using the best data, the best technology, and the best engineers in the world, were predicting that North Sea production would not peak until at least 2010 (Source:  Matt Simmons).  

The total North Sea (crude + condensate) HL plot that I did shows a beautiful linear progression from about 1988 onward.  Qt is 60 Gb, and they are about two-thirds depleted.  

In summary, I think that the premature discoveries of super-giants can cause odd production profiles. So it would be better to factor them out before you do modeling.

No, you should never throw any data away. That is one of the golden rules of the scientific method.  Yes, I know some statisticians like to throw away outliers, but you really should do this only if you understand what the fundamentals are behind the behavior. In reality, what you want to factor out should be part of the underlying model. I might be misunderstanding you, but why not keep the "premature discoveries" in the model?

Take a look at the discovery curves published by Laherrere.

You can see the bimodal components right there. The problem is that the two modes are highly asymmetric in the discovery profile but not so much in the production profile. My own analysis leads me to believe that the second peak gets strongly accentuated by a strong increase in the extraction rate.

I have never believed in the conventional symmetric Hubbert curves, preferring instead to treat the system as a N-order  temporal response to the initial discover stimulus curves.
Ever since about 1995, the extraction rates have progressively climbed so they could keep up with the diminishing returns from the remaining amount.

The full analysis is here

My list of Russian "giant" fields is simply an educated guess, based on various published stories of large fields. Russia's ten largest oilfields account for over 1.8 million barrels a day of Russian production. Its largest producer is still Samotlor, the one Russian field that once produced in excess of 3.5 million barrels of oil each day. Samotlor's output occasionally gets mentioned in various oil journals. The last guess in print had Stamoltor producing 320,000 barrels per day. Almost all the Russian giant oilfields are located in Western Siberia. One giant oilfield outside Siberia is the Romashkino field in the Volga Region. Prior to Western Siberia's oil discoveries, this was Russia's single biggest oil field. It still apparently produces close to 300,000 barrels a day. All of these giant fields are far past peak production. All have high water cuts. Russia is not a low cost oil producer, even in its largest oilfield.

Saudi Arabia Ghawar 1948 4,500
Mexico Cantarell 1976 1,211
Kuwait Burgan 1938 1,200
China Daquig 1959 1,108
Iraq Kirkuk 1927 900
Iraq Rumailia North 1958 700
Saudi Arabia Abqaiq 1940 600
Saudi Arabia Shayba 19751 600
U.S.A. Prudhoe Bay 1968 550
China Shengli 1962 547
Brazil Marlim 1985 530
Iraq Rumailia South 1953 500
Saudi Arabia Safaniyah 1951 500
Saudi Arabia Zuluf 1965 500

Even a cursory look at this list reveals that there have been major changes since the year 2000. It would be interesting if somebody could find an updated list for 2005. I couldn't locate one.

Do you think it is possible to do this analysis for the real fields productions?

Of course obtaining the production for the supergiant fields is a very daunting, even impossible, task but an aproximation, I believe, is plausible

Below is an article discussing why we should reinstate the M3 figures to the public:

http://www.freemarketnews.com/Analysis/64/4778/2006-05-05.asp?wid=64&nid=4778

"Gold is always the best measure of how much new money the government is creating. And the price of gold has been soaring! The dollar relative to gold has lost 60% of its value since 2000. That's bad news, because monetary inflation causes booms-and-busts."

"Gold works as a measure of inflation, but it would be better to know in advance. M3 would give us that advance warning."

chew on this, in 2004 the government took a line item charge for $11 trillion in order to fund medicare/caid.

you see... it's what you don't see.

As the debt load increases, it becomes harder to maintain a balance where money supply growth is rapid enough to allow most borrowers to service their debts and restrained enough that it still appears to be restrained. As debt loads mount, the inflation deflation question appears to me to be a question of on which side of a runnaway inflation / debt collapse deflation knife edge the dollar will fall.

Our wonderful new Federal Reserve Board Chairman has indicated that he will drop money out of helicopters if necessary to avoid a deflation. So if you take him at his word [which itself may be a doubtful proposition] inflation should be the more likely outcome.

BTW, if if comes to anything like the proverbial helicopter drop the dollar will be toast as the only thing that sustains a fiat currency if faith in the system.

Hey, I gotta go.  Just got a cell phone call from my boss that Ben took an especially smelly dump and they want the best cleanup technician they can find.

I think this is a better indicator of the effect of petroleum deficiency on the U.S. dollar (that is, compared to the Euro).  U.S. and Europe economies have much of the same petrofears right now.  

if the rest of the globe continues to allow the drunkard key employee any more 12 martini lunches, we're liable to watch him be double bound.

Best,

Matt

RR, you're right. I understood that mpg was 12.5% less, eg 20mpg instead of 22.9mpg. I just used the wrong word to describe it :) Nevertheless, -12.5% is much better than -30%, no? And not a bad price to pay for 20% extra power and 15% extra torque? Presumably an equivalent powered (but smaller) E85 engine would get better mpg than gasoline?

After reading Blume's essay, I don't trust him as a credible source. I don't know whether using DDG as fertilizer will work. But I know that some of the other things he said were plainly wrong, or blatant exaggerations. I would have to see someone demonstrate this in practice before I am willing to accept it.

Why do you believe corn is so prevalent? Corporate corruption a la ADM?

It is mostly political, and ADM has a lot of connections. I bet >90% of the people who support ethanol do not understand why there is a controversy over grain ethanol. The politicians, especially from the corn states, play it up as home grown fuels, helping farmers and the American economy. It plays quite well, especially in Peoria.

RR
 

The issue is that such a veh. gets into stability issues if the center of gravity moves outside the triangle defined by the contact patches of the 3 tires.

The motorcycle trike conversions are helped somewhat by having so much of their weight in the back, maybe the ZAP does the same thing with its battery pack, don't know... But if you unload the single front tire too much you start to create adhesion and handeling issues with respect to steering, since it is the only pivioting wheel I assume

We have only begun the work in understanding and using biotechnology and nanotechnology.

And theoretically:

Computing science is often primitive using old ideas embedded in new GUI:s.

Do we understand humans and humanity? There ought to be things left to do and understand to be able to create better societies to live in.

How do complex natural systems work? Can their behaviour be usefully predicted?

How do we create money and law in better ways within an inperfect system of inperfect individuals?

And on a bulkier level:

We have plenty of practical technical work left in making physical products easier to manufacture, repair and recycle.

We have not yet perfected fisson power with fuel recycling and fission product transmutation and management.

We have not perfected electro optical devices with LED:s lasers and photovoltaics.

There is probably plenty left to optimise in process chemistry.

There are thousands, no millions, of chemicals that we need to know more about to optimise practical use and avoid damaging humans and our environment.

I'll give you one very simple example of an idea that nobody will work on, but ought to be worked on. Dawkins says that life originated with the more or less accidental appearance of replicators (ur-DNA). This is brain dead, yet it is the reigning paradigm. On the other hand, Gaia, geophysiology, has gotten increased respect: the idea that earth forms an somewhat organismic system in which the cycling of elementary compounds (carbon, water, sulfur, nitorogen, etc.) which is to some extent stabilized by the presence of life on the planet. Life is the cycling of complex hydrocarbons within small entities, cells and bodies, etc. Is it possible that the larger cycles of geophysiology, i.e. cycling of simple compounds, induced or led to the cycling of complex hydrocarbons of cells and life? In other words, that the larger cycles of the planet led to the smaller cycles of the cell via some process of miniaturization? NO ONE is going to devote their life to that, although I wish someone would.

There are five or more  such projects I could outline for you -- not a one will be done anytime soon. No payoff, too much risk of no tangible results, etc.

I would be a magnificent research project to trace in some detail just the material flows in modern society, to make some estimate of the renewability of these various materials, the substitutability of one for another, the geographic distribution of the materials, the renewability, etc. This is just a generalization of what we're about on this site. Probably some part of this has been done, but I have not seen any really comprehensive effort.

These kind of things are quite different from most of (but not all) the science that's been done up til now. It involves trying to figure out how things evolve and work as total systems.

What I do think is happening is a sort of social braking (though not really in the sense of complexity or diminishing returns). Science, in this case in the sense of technology or engineering, has become so threatening in so many senses. Some of these reasons concrete, some are illusory - you can decide which is which according to personal tastes. For example, the DU discussions tend to focus on radioactivity - I would focus on distributing a fairly 'new' heavy metal in massive quantities throughout a region and its eco-systems - after decades, centuries, or millenia, humantiy will be able to evaluate just one of our tiny experiments in changing our world. I am fairly certain we will not be judged as having been very scientific in how we created, processed, and distributed such problems, though.

After a burst of unbalanced technological 'progress' - look, nuclear power! Weather satellites! GPS precise carpet bombing! New, improved, powdered antrax! - the systems which produced such 'innovations' no longer seem capable of continuing forward without massive problems. It looks as if most people aren't interested in playing Kali, and don't trust anyone else playing the role either. And a lot of social mechanisms (yes, including parasites like patent lawyers) are returning a certain balance to how quickly 'progress' is made.

This is not the end of science - it may be the end of scientific progress, if by that is meant what most of us consider science - we are all children of the 'modern scientific era.' Personally, I think this slowing down is vitally necessary, as their is no way that the current bunch of 2 year olds running around should have the matches, gasoline, and lack of supervision they do - especially with the 2 year old being handled even more fun toys, like this button with the MAD cool flashing light.)  

This subject is fascinating, of course - and again, one of viewpoint as much as any 'objective' facts. There have been times of furious intellectual churning, and other times of relative peace. In both extremes, some people are content, and some not. But science, in the sense of human inquiry using certain rigorous frameworks, is not any more likely to slow down or die out now any more than it did when the Greek city states disappeared. It will have its peaks and valleys. The last several generations are looking at science from a peak, and all they see are valleys. Personally, I think the fog makes looking at the other possible peaks merely a leap into the unknown. (And to be depressing - I am quite convinced much 'scientific progress' is being hidden - marketing and psychology, for example, have a much larger database of empirical information and concrete interest in using it than most people seem to understand, and this has been true for several generations.)

I don't think going to the grocery store for a packet of jerky in a hummer is appropriate technology though - humans are meant to exercise. Take your bike. Or at least walk to the bus stop. There's nothing wrong with line-drying your clothes, I've lived as much of my life using line-drying as not. "Appropriate Technology" is a late-60s/early 70s term I expect to come back.

I personally want to see radio survive, and am very happy to see the resurgence of CW (morse code) in ham radio and the lively QRP (low-power, easy to operate, generally built from kits) movement. Radio is only about 100 years old and yet, it's easy to imagine communications using low power CW existing just fine with 1600s technology; the only reason they didn't have it then is they didn't know it could be done.

They go on to say that the ITER will take ten years to build.

As long as fusion gets only such a derisory budget, less than a billion a year worldwide and as long as work proceeds only at such a leisurely, dilatory pace, fusion will always be the energy source of tomorrow.

That's the trouble with democracy (not that other systems don't have troubles too.) When it comes down to brass tacks, rather than just to easy answers to empty, consequence-free survey questions, the Great Shiftless Moron Mass will ignore the future, voting to loot whatever they can even if it's just to keep whatever they are familiar with going for one more day. See this for a fine example, or just search on "gas prices".

Disagree with you totally.
Agree with Kunstler.

I heard that the final nail in Jack Straw's political coffin was phone calls from the Whitehouse to Blair, letting him know the Bush adminstration was livid, because Straw had called plans to attack Iran with nukes, "nuts" and "inconcievable." Supposedly, Blair is right on message as usual, and regards Iran as the major threat to world peace and security. Replacing Straw, at a time like this, is ominous in the extreme. What it effectively means, is that Blair himself, has now taken completely control of foreign policy. This too is ominous, given his propensity for listening to supernatural voices, which conviniently  absolve him from taking personal responsibility for committing war crimes. To quote Black Sabbath, Blair is a Warpig!

Straw may even have been ready to resign, if it seemed an attack on Iran was inevitable. This could/would have been powerful weapon, and break on Britain joining the attack. Unfortunately, that potential weapon is lost. With Blair still in office, Britain will go to war again. So the only chance of averting this disaster, is to remove Blair as soon as possible. It will be interesting to hear what Straw has to say once the dust settles. Is he so angry at his demotion, that he wants revenge? Make no mistake. Blair will go anywhere Bush tells him to go. Whimps go to Bahgdad, real men go to Teheran!