R: "Hubbert's curve for US production turned out to be quite accurate."

D: "or, to put it another way, it has been demonstrated to be false."

I suggest you look at Hubbert's curve compared to actual US production. You can view this here.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imag...S_high.svg

As you should be able to see it is "quite accurate". If anyone could predict the stock market with this kind of accuracy they would certainly be rich. There are two interesting mismatches that both tell us a lot about the utility of the method. The first is that although the timing of the peak was accurately forcast, the peak is higher than Hubbert predicted. The difference in the peak reflects big discoveries in Alaska, particularly Prudhoe Bay, and in the deeper waters of the Gulf of Mexico. These areas had not been explored at all in 1956, so were not included at all in the reserve estimates upon which Hubbert's curve relies. As I explained before, the premise of this method is that most areas have been at least partly explored. This was nearly true in 1956 for the US, except for more remote regions such as Alaska and the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. For the method to work today for world oil, this would also have to be true. People involved in oil exploration, based on lots of exploratory wells, and intensive studies of the world's potentially productive sedimentary basins believe this is a true premise today. There may be some areas in the world that have been left out like Alaska and the deepwater GOM, but interestingly, Hubbert's curve gave the proper timing of the peak and matched the actual production from its 70"s peak through the 80's and 90's. It should be noted that this occurred despite the drilling boom in the US that occured after the oil embargo of 1974 that continued into the early 80's when the oil price collapsed. This drilling boom had no effect whatever on the observed Hubbert decline. The second mismatch is occurring now as the very steep post peak decline begins to soften in the late late 90's. This occurred and is occurring because advancing technology and expertise is allowing us to get more out of the reservoirs than we have in past. It should be clear however that this affect can only soften the decline, it cannot reverse it. There is still only so much oil in the reservoirs to begin with.

Let us discuss what this "softening" of Hubbert's curve amounts to. The curve predicted that in the year 2000, the US would be producing about the same amount of oil as it did in 1940. Because of the less steep decline this point is reached a bit later- right about now actually, so you can thank me and the rest of the hard-working people in the oil business for delaying that decline to 1940's production rate by about 8 years. It should be obvious, however that we cannot reverse this decline and peak oil in the USA will remain exactly at the time Hubbert predicted in 1956.

Since your postings here seem to show that you really understand nothing at all about the oil business, Hubbert's methods, and the conditions under which this approach can yield a fairly accurate forcast as it did for US production, I will now try to explain it to you as simply as possible. This link shows the oil production of Norway which almost perfectly fits a Hubbert curve:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imag...ubbert.svg

The reason the data fits so well is that Norway matchs the assumptions of Hubbert's model; no major production disruption, no production quotas, sufficient available capital, no limitation due to infrastructure. Since the North Sea area that is producing Norway's oil is relatively well explored, the model should continue to fit production into the future. Finding some entirely new oil play might alter the curve some, as happened in the USA with Alaska and the deep water Gulf of Mexico, but it is safe to assume that the peak oil production for Norway, as for the USA, is in the past.

Now we ought to discuss why Hubbert's method appears to work so well and then revisit the issue of how applicable and useful it might be to predicting the peak for world oil. Really an analysis like Hubbert's should be applied one oil producing basin at a time and the results summed. Each basin alone should follow the Hubbert curve closely, like that for Norway's production, given the conditions mentioned for Norway are applicable. Obviously, any summed curve will be inaccurate if new oil producing areas are discovered, so the question of how applicable the method is to World oil production hinges on if and how well all the world's sedimentary basins have been explored. The significance of any unexplored region depends on how much oil it might hold in relation to what we have already discovered. At this point in history nearly every potentially productive basin has had some exploration and we know a lot about the reservoirs, traps and potential reservoirs and traps. We also have discovered that the world's oil resources are skewed. Far more in found in the Middle East than elsewhere in the world. We understand the conditions that caused these prolific and large reserves of oil and no other areas appear to have similar conditions. The result of the skewness in oil resources is that for all practical purposes World oil production must mirror Middle Eastern oil production fairly closely- the oil peak will depend on the Middle Eastern oil peak, particularly that of Saudi Arabia. These areas have been fairly well explored, but some of the other conditions for Hubbert's curve to work have been lacking- they have not produced as much as they could have. This means predicting the peak becomes more difficult, not as easy as Norway's, with more uncertainty, but since the basins involved are fairly well explored, something as accurate as Hubbert's curve for the USA is possible.

Various experts come up with a fairly wide range of results, not unexpected given the large number of variables and the large number of basins being summed, but a world oil peak in the near future is clearly indicated by all The only thing that might alter these results is the discovery of an oil producing province approaching what is found in Saudi Arabia, but the likelihood of this is very small; the conditions necessary for these kinds of oil accumlations in other areas have not been observed. In the fifty years since Hubbert made his prediction of an oil peak for US production, there has been a lot of intensive exploration around the world and it is not inaccurate to say that our knowledge base for world oil is similiar to what Hubbert used to make his accurate prediction of the US oil peak in 1956. There is, for the reasons already dicussed, much uncertainty on the exact timing of the peak, nevertheless there is no reason to doubt it will occur.

>>"Worldwide oil reserves continue to rise even faster than America and China can burn it."<<

Actually Dan this is completely false. We are now using about 4 times more oil in a year than we find. The last year that oil discoveries matched production was 1984. This link gives some more data on this:

planetforlife.com/oilcrisis...ation.html

It should be obvious that unless the rise in consumption is curtailed or we suddenly begin finding much more oil, demand must outstrip the supply. The number of discoveries and the size of the discoveries per year is declining, not because we are failing to drill enough exploratory wells, but because the big fields which are easy to find are found. Declining discoveries worldwide point to the conclusion that most oil prone basins have been partly explored and what is left are fewer and smaller fields. These statistics are facts, Dan, you can sit back and hope for pie in the sky, but to simply ignore these facts as you choose to do is a poor strategy for our nation and the world.