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 …

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. Daniel Yergin has just published "The Quest," "a magisterial masterpiece," according to an endorsement by Dr. Lawrence Summers, a well known economist and ex-President of Harvard University. Mr. Yergin received his B.A. from Yale University in 1968, and earned his Ph.D. in International Relations (1974) from Cambridge University.

The other endorsements came from:
Mr. Walter Isaacson, a writer and biographer, and President of The Aspen Institute.Dr. Henry Kissinger, who received his A.B., A.M. and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation was titled "Peace, Legitimacy, and the Equilibrium (A Study of the Statesmanship of Castlereagh and Metternich)."Mr. Steve Coll, a journalist and writer, and President of the New America Foundation.Mr. Fred Krupp, an environmental lawyer from the University of Michigan, and CEO of the Environmental Defense Fund. Mr. Frederick W. Smith, B.A. in economics from Yale University, CEO of FedEx Corporati…

JPMorgan forecasts oil supply to fall short of demand by 600,000 barrels a day during the third quarter, even with the assumption that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries increases output by 1.2 million barrels a day in coming months.
The gap could narrow to 300,000 barrels a day by the fourth quarter, assuming Saudi Arabia increases production to 9.5 million barrels a day, Angola to 1.7 million and Iraq to 3 million, though “that may prove a stretch,” the bank said. Output from those three OPEC countries in March was 8.66 million, 1.56 million and 2.69 million barrels a day, respectively, it said.As I pointed out in the April 30 blog, the runaway Global Casino speculates on everything on the Earth and distorts all prices everywhere.  Mr. Casino is totally divorced from Ms. Reality, and his current bets on a lower oil price are as imaginary as his bets to the contrary. Earthlings beware! These speculative bets and brazen market manipulations can only last for seconds or d…

Here is a nice followup to my January 6, 2011, post on patents as a measure of U.S. productivity and creativity.  Now Big Pharma is getting ready to throw their towel into the ring and call it quits of sorts.  It seems to me that they were pursuing a wrong paradigm in their research and their colossal blunder was called by the unforgiving Mother Nature.  The mistake they seem to have made is a simplistic belief that one or few unique genes are responsible for each major illness.  Identify the genes and, voila, appropriate therapy presents itself.  Well, hundreds of billions of dollars later, they seem to have discovered that gene expression is context-dependent, and the environmental influences (epigenetics) are stronger than genetics.  This may be the best example of a seriously misguided huge research effort that essentially broke a whole industry.  So now federal government is stepping in with another corporate bailout plan, this time an $1 billion/year government research lab.

 Is…