LifeItself

Who would you rather believe, a renowned professor at BI Norwegian School of Management and consultant to IMF, The World Bank, the governments of Denmark, Norway, Canada and the U.S., etc., or your own lying eyes? If you follow the April 2012 issue of the World Oil, the good professor wins.

After having read the convincing "Peak Oil? - Not in Norway" piece in the World Oil, you may want to recalibrate your senses by looking carefully at the four graphs below. Click on each one of them if you want to see a high-resolution image.
Oil production rates from the North Sea and Norwegian Sea oilfields on the Norwegian continental shelf are a set of 65 approximately independent random variables. The total production from these 65 fields is then a random-sum process that yields a Gaussian distribution, in this context known as a "Hubbert curve" or "Hubbert peak." The thick blue line is the rate of oil production from Ekofisk. The Ekofisk production curve has two …

In the summer of 1858, Edwin Drake punched 33 ft of cast iron pipe into the earth to prevent near surface water from collapsing the hole. He then lowered drilling equipment into the cased hole and used a steam engine to drill a successful, 69 ft deep well. On August 27th, shallow oil flowed almost to the surface and was recovered with a sump pump. Within 10 years more than 5,500 wells had been drilled, and 1,200 were producing oil. Edwin Drake made absolutely no money on developing modern drilling technology and died a poor man.


On January 10, 1901, captain Anthony F. Lucas drilled a well to a depth of 1,139 ft (347 m) near Beaumont, Texas. By chance, he created the "Lucas Gusher" that blew oil over 150 feet (50 m) into the air at a rate of 100,000 barrels per day (4,200,000 gallons per day). Because of that spectacular event, the modern oil industry was born overnight. By the end of 1902, more than 500 companies had been formed and 285 wells were in operation. Captain Luc…

Yesterday I gave a presentation to a group of distinguished business leaders.  In my presentation, I tried to show that the global rate of production of petroleum and the associated lease condensate is at an all-time high or a "peak" that at a greatly expanded scale looks like a "plateau."  I used my published, peer-reviewed extensions of King Hubbert's approach to support my arguments.


I received a significant push back from several members of the audience.  Their arguments were as follows:
King Hubbert tried to address the question of finite resources and today we know he was wrong.Even though Hubbert cycles emerge for individual oil provinces, they cannot emerge for the world.  We have been predicting the peak of global oil production for a long time and it never happened up until now.Technology will always be ahead of geology and, therefore, we will continue to produce ever more petroleum each year, just from different places, and at a higher price.Oil shale…

Dr. Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate and professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton, wrote this in his Op-Ed, entitled "Natural Born Drillers":
And this tells us that giving the oil companies carte blanche isn’t a serious jobs program. Put it this way: Employment in oil and gas extraction has risen more than 50 percent since the middle of the last decade, but that amounts to only 70,000 jobs, around one-twentieth of 1 percent of total U.S. employment. So the idea that drill, baby, drill can cure our jobs deficit is basically a joke.

Why, then, are Republicans pretending otherwise? Part of the answer is that the party is rewarding its benefactors: the oil and gas industry doesn’t create many jobs, but it does spend a lot of money on lobbying and campaign contributions. The rest of the answer is simply the fact that conservatives have no other job-creation ideas to offer. His piece was followed by 554 reader comments, many of which read like this:
...They (the R…