M King Hubbert's 1956 Paper That Started It All

Tyler_JC

http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/1956/1956.pdf

It was this 57 page essay that started the entire "Peak Oil Movement".

Enjoy. Smile

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PraiseDoom · Heavy Crude Joined: Apr 23, 2007 Posts: 297

coyote

Thanks! There are so many conflicting statements about exactly what Hubbert said about the US peak (1970, 1971, 10-15 years from now, etc.), it's really nice to be able to read the original.

Also very interesting to read Hubbert mentioning the regions that are important now, Alberta, Venezuela, etc.

Multi-peak regions, offshore resource, changes in extraction technologies, exponential growth, population growth... Hubbert was certainly thorough.

Ah, the things nuclear was supposed to do for us!
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malcomatic_51 · Heavy Crude Joined: Dec 24, 2005 Posts: 186 Location: UK

Very interesting to read through the original at last rather than just references to it.

It looks more like he made a lucky guess to me. The legend that he got it right for US oil omits that he made two guesses, of which one was pretty close. The other forecasts he made were way off. For nat gas he was predicting a US peak back in the 1970s with a sharp decline by now. It is true that US gas production has peaked, but it has yet to decline much.

His forecast for world oil production was miles out. He suggests a peak in 2000 at 12.5 billion barrels per year. Well here we are in 2007 at 31 BB/a and we still aren't at the peak for definite, quite a number don't think we'll get there for another five years at least.

Likewise his forecast for coal production now looks ludicrously optimistic. He is talking about peaks in 2150, while in fact it looks like we'll his Peak Coal in the next 20 years.

The basic weakness of his forecast was exactly as CERA put it - it rests on what you know about extractable reserves. He does point out that reserves growth will enhance final production, although he doubts this will affect the time of the peak by much (in this respect it looks like he was correct, notwithstanding above comments on his accuracy).

Perhaps I am being too harsh. He was light-years ahead of anyone else in appreciating the limitations of the supplies of oil and gas. His forecasts for timings of peaks were pretty good for oil at least, relative to other forecasts of the 1950s (like everyone flying to work by 2000....). As he pertinently points out, of the energy contained in the entire global fossil fuel endowment, only 14% is conventional oil and gas. >70% is coal, according to the data he had. These figures do exaggerate the dominance of coal, since coal reserves have shrunk while oil reserves have grown since he published. Even so, it is sobering that oil was always fairly rare within fossil fiels.

At the time he wrote that paper, global oil production was 5 BB/a. That is one sixth what it is today. Cumulative US production was about 60 BB; today it is three times that. It is quite thought-provoking to look at his graphs of oil and energy consumption and see how astounding the growth in energy supply has been within half a human life time. It feels to us like it has always been there, but it is in fact so extraordinarily novel in history. Seeing that, you have to think more seriously about the die-off scenario.

Tyler_JC

I wonder why his predicted expectations of global cumulative coal supplies were so insanely far off.

According to his paper, he expected coal supplies to be in the range of 5000 billion tons.

Currently reserves are only 1000 billion tons (give or take).

We only consume about .5 billion tons every year right now.

Where did all the coal go?
_________________
"www.peakoil.com is the Myspace of the Apocalypse."