[Tanada]

Given that Peak Oil took place or is about to take place now and given that petroleum consumption was negligible before 1912 we can say that (roughly) one sigma is 33 years wide on the curve.

Therefore we get:

Four Sigma's out 1879-1912 0.1% of all petroleum consumption, which is about as negligible as you can get and still have a reading. Petroleum consumption was almost exclusively for lighting (kerosene and gas lamps) with lubrication playing a distant second place role.

Three Sigma's out 1912-1945 2.1% of all petroleum consumption, which takes us right through World War Two with all its massive navy/air force/army equipment burning oil left and right and blowing up refineries and so on and so forth.

Two Sigma's out we have 1945-1978 13.6% of all petroleum consumption leading us through USA Peak production and into the Iranian period of unrest. Integrated circuits and the Space Exploration period began here.

One Sigma out 1978-2011 34.1% of all petroleum consumption leading to truly massive growth of the human population. In 1980 world population was just over 4.5 Billion, this year we passed 7 Billion. The Green Revolution of petrochemical pesticides and massive doses of fertilizer made this huge growth possible as well as technological growth into everything from cyberknife cancer treatments to iPad's in millions of homes.

During all of these periods things were always improving for the average human somewhere on Earth. Can we continue to better our existence into the future?

The next Sigma, 2011-2044 will determine if Humanity finds a way to keep a high tech civilization through power source switching, or if we fall all the way back to animal power Agriculture until someone reinvents growth through energy consumption.

[Cloud9]

I am an old man in a country that has no room for old men. Damn.

[Plantagenet]

Once you reach the top of a bell curve, its all downhill after that.


While people might quibble over the exact timing of the peak or the nature of the shape and skewness of the global oil production curve, there isn't much doubt that global oil production will soon start inexorably decreasing.

Thats when the global economy will get totally trashed.

[dissident]

I highly doubt that global oil production will follow a Gaussian even though as your post shows that would be bad enough. Don't forget that extraction pressure (driven by demand and facilitated by technology) was much lower in the past. Discovery is not the only parameter that controls production. The pseudo-Gaussian really pertains to discovery. Production is a convolution with another function which lags discovery. This function would be a constant if all that happened is that as new oil fields were discovered they were produced in exactly the same way as in 1880, including the density of rigs per field and the same type of rigs (and assuming all oil fields had roughly the same characteristics).

In my view the current irregular plateau is future production brought forward by demand and we are past the peak. If demand were to reverse globally to mirror its historical levels, then we could expect the downward slide in production to mirror the upward ramp. But demand is growing (recession shocks notwithstanding). To maintain production requires every scrap of oil to be extracted and extracted faster. A large part of this would have been production farther out into the future if the demand was falling. But it is coming onstream now. So the Gaussian's future tail is being redistributed towards the peak, producing a transient plateau in the last few years and leading to a very sharp drop in the future.

The production history may look like the skewed normal distribution (alpha=-4 in the graphic):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... sities.svg

[Pops]

My WAG is there are to 2 curves, one is oil that flows on it's own and a later one is "oil" that must be made to flow. Imagine the 2 curves together as a wave just about to break.

What dissident describes makes complete sense. We are increasing todays production of conventional, flowable oil at the expense of tomorrow's. Using our advanced technology we are extracting the low viscosity conventional oil much faster than in the past bringing the bulk of production forward. Additionally and obviously, we will have extracted the easiest conventional light oil first, leaving the harder, deeper, more technologically challenging heavy but still flowing oil for last. The tail will be longer but thinner - and that's just the conventional light sweet stuff.

If, after the peak of easy and cheap conventional oil there is sufficient demand to continue extracting hydrocarbons, we'll turn increasingly to the sands and other kerogens. They will never equal the rate of extraction or return on energy invested allowed by conventional, light, Jed Clampet type crude squirting out of the ground under it's own pressure. Extra heavy oil and kerogen just can't be produced at the same rate as conventional oil because they essentially are a product that must be mined and manufactured.

I'm not sure if Hubbert was taking tar sands and such into account, I kinda think he figured we'd have nuke power too cheap to meter by now. I added x-heavy oilish manufactured stuff on to the end of the curve since I think that is what all the big wigs are talking about when they say we'll be burning FFs for decades to come.

Here's how I see the curve, a wave of light oil breaking on a tar-sand beach...




The best evidence that we are past the peak of the easy stuff is that the hard stuff is now extracted profitably and the extra heavy not-even-oil products are being manufactured profitably. That is seen by the optimists as a good sign, not being as optimistic I don't see it that way.

.

[MD]

My WAG is there are to 2 curves, one is oil that flows on it's own and a later one is "oil" that must be made to flow. Imagine the 2 curves together as a wave just about to break.

There are more than two waves. Sweet light --in particular the variety that flows on its own-- is the largest of all energy waves to date. Optimists fully expect the next wave to be much higher. Pessimists look at sweet light as a tsunami, not to be repeated.

[Tanada]

Oh I fully expect the future portion of the curve to be skewed as TPTB do everything they can to continue BAU so that they can stay at the top of the cultural and financial heap just as long as they possibly can. There are still a great many things the Governments world wide could do to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil in the long run. The problem is most of those changes will take people currently making the decisions out of the picture and put other people in decision making positions, and TPTB abhor the very idea of surrendering their authority.

If we had followed the advice we were given about mitigation 20 years ago then the Gaussian distribution would be more normal and the effects much less painful. TPTB chose to kick the can down the road to where we are now sand the average person on the planet didn't do anything to stop the merry go round because on average nobody wanted to believe the ride had to come to an end.

If we had gone all out building breeder reactors starting 20 years ago and using the best technology then available we would have the extra capacity right now to build that mythical Hydrogen Highway we were promised almost a decade ago while at the same time eliminating 90% of the coal consumption and so on and so forth. We chose instead to play semantic games with 'green' and 'renewable' energy that have nothing like the energy density of Petroleum, let alone that of fissionable materials in a breeder reactor!

If you don't like the Hydrogen Highway concept because hydrogen is just and energy carrier you should admit to yourself that Fossil Fuels are just an energy carrier for ancient solar energy falling on the Earth. Less than a thousandth of one percent of solar energy falling on the Earth was made into Fossil Fuels even if you count everything including the Kerogens Pops mentioned in his post. Heck by the same standard the Actinides are solar energy from ancient Supernovae trapped in the nuclei of fissionable metals.

Humanity is at the crossroads. Either we accept technology to release captured energy in the form of Nuclear Fission as part of our every day lives, or we go back down to a stoop labor based economy of subsistence agriculture just to feed ourselves while the Global Elites reign over us in luxury with the last dregs of the Fossil Fuels.

[MD]

...

Humanity is at the crossroads. Either we accept technology to release captured energy in the form of Nuclear Fission as part of our every day lives, or we go back down to a stoop labor based economy of subsistence agriculture just to feed ourselves while the Global Elites reign over us in luxury with the last dregs of the Fossil Fuels.

The next energy wave, as it sits right now, will be secondary fossil fuels. The optimists are all on their boards shouting "the next wave is coming!". The pessimists see it as the second wave of a tsunami, filled with the filth of the first.

[dissident]

...

Humanity is at the crossroads. Either we accept technology to release captured energy in the form of Nuclear Fission as part of our every day lives, or we go back down to a stoop labor based economy of subsistence agriculture just to feed ourselves while the Global Elites reign over us in luxury with the last dregs of the Fossil Fuels.

The next energy wave, as it sits right now, will be secondary fossil fuels. The optimists are all on their boards shouting "the next wave is coming!". The pessimists see it as the second wave of a tsunami, filled with the filth of the first.

So we are guaranteed climate hell, sooner rather than later. There is already evidence of accelerating CO2 emissions in spite of the economic downturn since 2008. The analysis by Gail at The Oil Drum indicates this is part of the trend in the last decade for increasing coal consumption and in my view from all the other EROEI poor fossil deposits being pushed into development around the world. Yes, even shale gas.

People don't realize how fragile agriculture is. Weather is everything and climate controls weather.