[mekrob]

I was goofing off on the Internet while debating this guy about tar sands and oil shale when I stumbled upon this. Now I know that this is pretty ... well... simple for us who understand oil depletion. But for the newcomers and the people whom you tell about oil production and decline, tell them to go to this site. It has a very basic graph of exponential growth. You enter in the growth rate, the total reserves and current reserve production. So when someone says we have 5 trillion barrels of oil (which we do), then they can learn that's only about 60 years with a meager 2% growth rate.

[ohanian]

Ha Ha Ha

This is fun

[Aimrehtopyh]

Fun to play with but doesn't illustrate peak oil very well at all. Hubbert said that around the midpoint your extraction rate will fall no matter what you do. That model allows exponential increase in the extraction rate until the day the last drop is sucked out.

The link seems to have disappeared.

Ohanian, where did you get that toy?

[mekrob]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Aimrehtopyh', 'F')un to play with but doesn't illustrate peak oil very well at all. Hubbert said that around the midpoint your extraction rate will fall no matter what you do. That model allows exponential increase in the extraction rate until the day the last drop is sucked out.

The link seems to have disappeared.

Ohanian, where did you get that toy?

[Kingcoal]

The problem with a lot of depletion models is that they are too simple, with many static terms that are in reality, not static. For example, they generally don't take into account technological advances and efficiency improvements.

[mekrob]

I thought it's been pretty well established that efficiency gains never really matter when it comes to energy use. If you are more efficient, you will still use the same amount of fuel as if you didn't have the gains, but you'll just go farther or have the house colder longer, etc.