How then, do we move backwards? How does a society, with most of the people having no clue of future events, move from being dependent on a vast and intertwined network of goods and services produced by the indigenous people of whereever, to a local resource and renewable energy based society, and do so in the timeframe available (20-30 years using the most liberal extimates, 10-20 with resonable estimates, 5-10 with worst case scenarios), all the while prices on everything increasing, world politics getting more militaristic, governments continuously reducing civil liberties, shortages of goods on the market and weather patterns resembling bad Hollywood movies?
Posted: Sat Jan 21, 2006 9:38 pm Post subject: Re: I'm confused. How do you calculate and model this data?
ReserveGrowthRulz wrote:
Now that you won't even admit to having read anything Colin has written, I don't suppose you are familiar with Arringtons work? Attansai and Root at the USGS, particularly the Enigma paper in 1995?
What troubles me is that they sometimes give reserve growth in the 1000% range and other times at less than 100%. I can understand the former if these were estimates from 100 years ago. I can understand the latter as standard conservative engineering estimates of a factor of 2.
Posted: Sun Jan 22, 2006 1:21 pm Post subject: Re: I'm confused. How do you calculate and model this data?
WebHubbleTelescope wrote:
ReserveGrowthRulz wrote:
Now that you won't even admit to having read anything Colin has written, I don't suppose you are familiar with Arringtons work? Attansai and Root at the USGS, particularly the Enigma paper in 1995?
Lets start with just the basics of your inaccuracies, shall we? While blogging away in ignorance, apparently it escaped you that Root and Attansai aren't Canadians, and they aren't consultants.
A reasonable explanation for reserve growth which isn't limited to "petroleum engineers just lie because I don't understand the reference to California oilfields" is here...
Now....since blogging in mediocrity is something you are apparently very familiar with, let me help you from NOT doing it again.
On the link provided, check out the about the fifth reference, I'll point it out to you since apparently you aren't familiar with it..not a surprise, its one of those researchy type works which affects lots of those which come after and which aren't usually noticed by the amateur ranks in their pursuit of conspiracy theories....here....I'll copy and paste it for you so it won't be so difficult to find.
"Attanasi, E.D., and Root, D.H., 1994, The enigma of oil and gas field growth: American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin, v. 78, no. 3, p. 321-332."
Now, it is best to go to your local library and actually READ something referenced rather than pretending you are familiar with the "enigma" paper, and when finished then maybe you can blog something without looking like standard "me make models but know nothing" amateur type.
You'll like the paper, the guy has data which you whine about not being able to get, provides it, plus he has a MODEL! He models around a little, and then comes up with a conclusion. It pretty much disintergrates the idea of reserve growth being something which can be dispatched out of hand as a "bad guess"...if it were...engineers are smart enough to guess better the NEXT time...which we do...and guess what? Reserve growth is still there! Tricky thing, reserve growth ( what amateurs call "bad guesses").
Now run along and do your homework, and try not to blog in such an inaccurate and silly manner next time.
WebHubbleTelescope wrote:
What troubles me is that they sometimes give reserve growth in the 1000% range and other times at less than 100%. I can understand the former if these were estimates from 100 years ago. I can understand the latter as standard conservative engineering estimates of a factor of 2.
Doubling the intial reserves estimates of the California fields wouldn't have covered their reserve growth by an order of magnitude. So pretending to use alleged "standard conservative engineering estimates" simply means you aren't familiar with them in the petroleum industry, which also helps explain your fundamental misunderstanding of the entire issue in the first place. Want me to reference some of the original reserve growth papers? Arrington, whom you didn't mention, did his original studies in the 50's I think....considering you can't find a paper 10 years old, I'm not surprised you didn't even mention him. M. Verma has a recent work published in some natural resource bulletin or another using Arringtons original method, modified a little, want to pretend you've read that one as well?
Joined: Oct 23, 2005 Posts: 1654 Location: East of Eden
Posted: Sun Jan 22, 2006 5:11 pm Post subject: Re: I'm confused. How do you calculate and model this data?
You know, ReserveGrowthRulz, I don't know anything about modeling; but repeatedly, in different threads, I've seen posts from you that are insulting, sarcastic, snotty, overbearing and downright inappropriate. I don't think you've given 128shot a very good first impression of this forum. The other posters in this thread have done a very good job of keeping their cool, even with all the insults you're throwing around. Even if everything you're saying is 100% correct, you're still acting like a child. Doesn't help your cause. _________________ "If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst." — Thomas Hardy
Posted: Sun Jan 22, 2006 5:31 pm Post subject: Re: I'm confused. How do you calculate and model this data?
coyote wrote:
You know, ReserveGrowthRulz, I don't know anything about modeling; but repeatedly, in different threads, I've seen posts from you that are insulting, sarcastic, snotty, overbearing and downright inappropriate. I don't think you've given 128shot a very good first impression of this forum. The other posters in this thread have done a very good job of keeping their cool, even with all the insults you're throwing around. Even if everything you're saying is 100% correct, you're still acting like a child. Doesn't help your cause.
I didn't realize I was insulting anyone.....the sarcasm I am familiar with, but when people want to PRETEND they know something when in fact they don't, sarcasm strikes me as a completely reasonable response.
As for helping my cause...unlike some of the more zealot Peakers, I could care less. Unlike a Peaker "cause" groupie, I simply am a proponent of the marketplace solving marketplace problems, and commodity shortages aren't much more than a marketplace problem, no matter how badly a merry band of Peakers wants to turn it into the end of the world.
If a dissenting view is unwelcome, it is unfortunate that the Peaker view can't stand up to a single voice in dissent. Myself I consider the idea itself slightly more robust than what you are implying, without drawing quite the "end of the world" conclusions which appear so popular around here.
Posted: Sun Jan 22, 2006 8:40 pm Post subject: Re: I'm confused. How do you calculate and model this data?
ReserveGrowthRulz wrote:
"Attanasi, E.D., and Root, D.H., 1994, The enigma of oil and gas field growth: American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin, v. 78, no. 3, p. 321-332."
Note the above paper. The authors are from the USGS. I am about to do a complete deconstruction of the paper based on my knowledge of how people can misuse statistical methods.
First of all, the authors put the following curve front and center. This shows how "reserve growth" mutiplies from an initial estimate to some huge correction that seems absurd on the face of it. But 15X ?
Second, the estimates only start in the year 1977, so all the data points prior to this are extrapolations (for example, when they go back anywhere from 20 to 90 years, no discovery estimates are supplied for that year).
Third, the data that they extrapolate from, discoveries made since 1977, only account for around 3% of the data (around 4500 mbls). You may be able to estimate an election from exit polls of 3% of the population (maybe not with Bush ) but the authors did not make the argument that discovery estimation follows a stationary process. Just like exit polling, the sampling has to be evenly distributed, in this case over a 100 year span, for them to extrapolate like this.
Fourth, of the discoveries made between 1977 and 1991, the bulk of the estimation correction occurred within 2 years of the initial estimate. Why not wait 2 years to establish the initial estimate for that year? For all we know, discoveries could be made in the month of December, a quick note entered, while within a few months, but in the next calendar year, an update was made that doubles the estimate. I say so what, wait a year or two. These corrections are amplified by bad intial estimates, much like a chaotic system. Filter, I say, filter.
Of the discoveries starting in 1977, most of the big estimation errors are corrected within the first two years. If you look at the year 1983 in fact, the reserve correction went down from 1985 to 1991. I suppose you can call this a statistical artifact but I would come back and say the extrapolated curves are statistical artifices arriving from just plain bad assumptions on sample size and stationarity.
Above all, nowhere in the data do I see reserve growths of 15X occurring in any data. Perhaps extrapolated in some weird way the math comes out like that (their "model" amounts to a strict monotonic increase but at a reduced rate of increase of reserve growth per year), but I see only estimates going up by a factor of between 1 and 2, after settling within the first few years. It really seems odd that the discovery estimate has this kind of priority to be made in a year or two. Like I said before, I would think that the initial estimate is conservative to allow the decision for business profits to be made objectively. After that, when rigs are constructed within the next five years (at the late end for offshore in particular), a much better estimate can be made. However, if you look at the discoveries between 1975 and 1991 with this viewpoint, the "reserve growth" is much less dramatic. Which is what the update to the "enigma" paper made by Canadian authors showed here.
The sad thing about this, is that these are US scientists and engineers (presumably) employed by the USGS. The rest of the world looks up to these guys as the best that a good education can buy. So what does a country like Saudi Arabia or Kuwait do? They see what the US geologists say about the possibilities of reserve growth. And then apply it to their own reserves. So they multiply their numbers by the Anastassi and Root correction factor. The good old USA can't be wrong? Can they?
If we did this out of some political agenda, shame on us. I guess we are getting the payback we deserve.
Posted: Sun Jan 22, 2006 10:06 pm Post subject: Re: I'm confused. How do you calculate and model this data?
128shot wrote:
Tensions run high, particulary with doomsayers
Still, I'm confused on how to get some kind of data representation I can present in 3 weeks...this has to be as scientifical as possible..
For a minute there, I thought I recalled a Bushism. But then I looked it up and yes indeed scientifical is a word. It means scientific. Which I am for, BTW.
Posted: Sun Jan 22, 2006 11:09 pm Post subject: Re: I'm confused. How do you calculate and model this data?
WebHubbleTelescope wrote:
ReserveGrowthRulz wrote:
"Attanasi, E.D., and Root, D.H., 1994, The enigma of oil and gas field growth: American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin, v. 78, no. 3, p. 321-332."
Note the above paper. The authors are from the USGS. I am about to do a complete deconstruction of the paper based on my knowledge of how people can misuse statistical methods.
Cool. But first you have to find any statistics in the paper....I don't recall any offhand, but it was a year ago I first read the paper, they may have squeaked one in there somewhere.
I'll find Verma's paper tomorrow and get its printed location out, he used the original Arrington method with a slight modification rather than what Root and Attanasi did. Similar method, no statistics, and better yet, he included the equations for his model for both oil and gas. I think one of his points was that his ultimate growth curves were slightly lower than what Root and Attanasi came up with.
Posted: Sun Jan 22, 2006 11:24 pm Post subject: Re: I'm confused. How do you calculate and model this data?
ReserveGrowthRulz wrote:
WebHubbleTelescope wrote:
ReserveGrowthRulz wrote:
"Attanasi, E.D., and Root, D.H., 1994, The enigma of oil and gas field growth: American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin, v. 78, no. 3, p. 321-332."
Note the above paper. The authors are from the USGS. I am about to do a complete deconstruction of the paper based on my knowledge of how people can misuse statistical methods.
Cool. But first you have to find any statistics in the paper....I don't recall any offhand, but it was a year ago I first read the paper, they may have squeaked one in there somewhere.
I'll find Verma's paper tomorrow and get its printed location out, he used the original Arrington method with a slight modification rather than what Root and Attanasi did. Similar method, no statistics, and better yet, he included the equations for his model for both oil and gas. I think one of his points was that his ultimate growth curves were slightly lower than what Root and Attanasi came up with.
There are four dense pages of tables in the paper. Two pages for oil and two pages for NG. I will do a scan and use word-recognition software to convert it into a spreadsheet. I have definite ideas on how to analyze the data. It will be extremely interesting if I can come up with an independent eval of the data.
As Winston Churchill once said, "It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."
Posted: Sun Jan 22, 2006 11:54 pm Post subject: Re: I'm confused. How do you calculate and model this data?
pstarr wrote:
15x reserve growth sounds abiotic? Are these guys kidding?
I believe it is caused by some very early estimates that were way off. Once they registered an estimate somewhat close within the first several years after discovery, then the error correction creep appears between 1x and 2x over long periods.
My current theory based on the quirks of human behavior is that underlings always give conservative estimates. That coupled with the fact that abandoned wells stop counting at some point right at the eventual estimate causes a monotonic error drift. This essentially falls into the class of estimates that suffer from truncation bias. Since error estimates are not centered around 0 with equal weights positive or negative, then it turns into a continual drift upwards. From the looks of the data, no one ever wants to make a guess that eventually overestimates, so the bias is always positive.
One quick analogy that I can think of is The Price is Right strategy. You always try to lowball the guess if someone just made one and you happen to be the last guesser. If you can only win if you don't overguess, then it makes sense to just add a single cent to the other guy's estimate. The worst that can happen is that you both overbid. The best case is that you win. The odds are very slim that the other guy can win if you make the margin small enough. I think if you look at how auction prices rise, it follows a similar pattern of a monotonically increase which starts to level off after a while. But, again, these are both human behaviors which deal with psychological battles more than anything else. And business is largely psychological -- how to trick the customer into parting with his money. You just have to know who the customer is, to know how it will play out.
Joined: Dec 16, 2004 Posts: 705 Location: Santa Monica, CA
Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2006 1:34 am Post subject: Re: I'm confused. How do you calculate and model this data?
WebHubbleTelescope wrote:
One quick analogy that I can think of is The Price is Right strategy. You always try to lowball the guess if someone just made one and you happen to be the last guesser. If you can only win if you don't overguess, then it makes sense to just add a single cent to the other guy's estimate. The worst that can happen is that you both overbid. The best case is that you win. The odds are very slim that the other guy can win if you make the margin small enough. I think if you look at how auction prices rise, it follows a similar pattern of a monotonically increase which starts to level off after a while. But, again, these are both human behaviors which deal with psychological battles more than anything else. And business is largely psychological -- how to trick the customer into parting with his money. You just have to know who the customer is, to know how it will play out.
WebHubbleTelescope, why is this reserve growth-- for whatever reason it happens-- is it not a factor in recently discovered oil. If last year's oil discoveries are about 9bbl and those discoveries end up producing three times that amount, then the idea that discoveries are insufficient in comparison to current consumption would be false. Why are these new fields not going to grow like the ones in the past?
Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2006 8:18 am Post subject: Re: I'm confused. How do you calculate and model this data?
Code:
Like I said before, this is basically a bean-counting exercise and I know that they know how much is under the ground. If they were to spill the beans, we would all be better off.
Woww, you are completly in the dark what we "oilers" do. I will need to include in the category "oilers" geologists.
The one thing you need to bare in mind is that we do not see the reservoir underground as you see your capacitor. Here is a way to visualize this.
Go to your back yard and take your drinking straw and make a hole of that diameter. Now based on what you see from the ground that you pulled out in the sample volume of that hole try to characterize the properties of the rest of your back yard under the grass. Now go "drill" a few more "wells" the same way and IMPROVE your estimate of what you think is going on spatially underground.
THIS IS WHAT we are doing in trying to evaluate the reserves in a field. Our bore hole diameters underground will be on the order of magnitude of 7 to 8 1/2 inches !!!
Hope that helps.
You might do a seach on my name of my oldest posts where I tried to explain in greater detail how we "petroleum" engineers do our work. _________________ Men argue, nature acts !
Voltaire
"...In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation."
Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2006 11:36 am Post subject: Re: I'm confused. How do you calculate and model this data?
WebHubbleTelescope wrote:
128shot wrote:
Tensions run high, particulary with doomsayers
Still, I'm confused on how to get some kind of data representation I can present in 3 weeks...this has to be as scientifical as possible..
For a minute there, I thought I recalled a Bushism. But then I looked it up and yes indeed scientifical is a word. It means scientific. Which I am for, BTW.
LOL.
Even though I'm not sure you ment that to be funny, I thought it was.
Never the less, my problem is still the same. Though I'm finding more on this forum than I thought I would.
I still can't find data I can represent because there is no calculation put up for it. Like a formula or something. garr..
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