Black Bear

Peak Oil for Dummies

See comment of Blackbear.


On Aug 09 03:19 PM Poborsky wrote:

> Care to explain why north sea fields are degrading 10% pa. This means
> that exponentially these oil fields are all but finished.

Peak Oil for Dummies

Please bear with me for some elementary oil mathematics.
For many single oil wells production varies approximately as F*EXP(-t/Tc) where t is time and Tc is the time constant. Here EXP is the Euler's number being approximately 2.718 in value. F is the initial or flush number of barrels produced per unit of time. The total production as a function of time is given by P(t) = F*Tc*[1 - EXP(-t/Tc)]. For very large values of time the total production approaches F*Tc as the flow rate diminishes to zero. In one time constant of production 63.21% of the total is obtained. When the well has been pumped for a time equal to 4.605*Tc, 99% of the oil has been obtained. Thus it becomes obvious that it is best to make enough oil to pay for the well before the first time constant has been reached. For an oil field drilling must be done constantly to maintain a given amount of production as all the wells behave as mentioned. Without knowing a lot about the large oil fields it is hard to go into the economics of production. It is interesting to note that a well with a flush production of 10,000 bbl/day would not be considered good in Libya whereas a well with flush production of 100 bbl/day would be a good one in the Bradford oil field. This is due to differing costs and time constants.
When dealing with things that vary exponentially great caution must be exercised. An exponential population growth in the presence of an exponential decrease in resources is a very dangerous situation.

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Obviously the problem is the overpopulation of the world! 6 billion people and a pleasant living for all is inconsistant.

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Oil cannot be produced in USA for $30/bbl!

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Nixon did not take us of the gold standard in 1971. It was done in 1933 by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Nixon stopped backing the dollar with silver certificates and took silver out of coinage.

Expect Oil to Approach $100/bbl Again By Summer

Oil producers would love it if oil were priced as given in the second sentence of this article. $54 per gallon oil would bring $2268 per barrel. That is almost as much as 3 ounces of gold! This is a really serious mistake for the author to make. After that it is hard to believe anything he writes because it is clear he never reads or proofs his own articles!

Oil Will Continue to Trend Higher

One can use the method of least squares to get a straight line out of a number of points greater than or equal to two. The points might seem to be random but they may well indicate a historical linear trend. However, the straight lines cannot be extrapolated into the future anymore than a fortune teller can see the future in his or her crystal ball!

Is This Oil Price Manipulation?

I don't think the oil refineries find it advantageous to do anything to raise the price of oil. Because it is the basis of all of their products they profit from low oil prices and high gasoline prices!