[PenultimateManStanding]

I don't post at theoildrum.com but some of you perhaps do. Jeffrey Brown, aka westexas, is well known for his Export Land Model which proposes that the exports of oil exporting counties will fall faster than production declines because of rising internal consumption. That makes sense. But he made a statement today that can only harm his credibility. He should edit it. If you have his email, send him a line for me please.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('westexas', 'B')ased on the HL plot, which assumes approximately a bell-shaped curve (strictly speaking, parabolic I believe), the North Sea peaked when it was about 50% depleted.

[PenultimateManStanding]

Has no one told Jeff? Leanan? Maybe nobody notices or cares. Still, it makes him look a bit silly with such a high school math gaffe.

[PenultimateManStanding]

OK, so I'm talking to myself again. Nothing new. But the Gaussian function is beautiful. I love the purity of it. It says that if you take the inverse of a standard deviation (the inflexion point of the curve) times the radians of a circle and multiply all that times base euler's number exponent negative one half of the square of the ratio of distance from the mean divided by the standard deviation, you get a bell! Gloria Mathematica!

[dinopello]

The Normal distribution is nice for modeling worlwide oil production because of the central limit theorum (Lyapunov's). Individual wells or fields may not match very well, but the aggregate comes out as modeled nicely by the Normal.

I think Brown is referring the the (so-called) Hubbert Parabola

Looks like a roll your own distribution to best fit the observed data. My guess would be that most regions are asymetrically produced with the decline having a long tail (production obviously starts abruptly at 0).

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Shannymara', 'W')ell, maybe people are reluctant to correct his math if they aren't certain about it themselves. Here's his email address for you:

westexasATaolDOTcom

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dinopello', '
')I think Brown is referring the the (so-called) Hubbert Parabola

[dinopello]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dinopello', '
')I think Brown is referring the the (so-called) Hubbert Parabola

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dinopello', '
')It's cute how you get all worked up about this stuff.

[PenultimateManStanding]

When I was a little child I loved numbers. I wanted to know at 4 years old what it meant to put a number above a line and have another number under it. If I had it all to do over again, I would have been a mathematician.

[PenultimateManStanding]

Jeffrey Brown replied that the parabola was, as dinopello mentioned, a reference to a method to approximate cumulative production under the curve and not the bell curve itself. So his quote
"Based on the HL plot, which assumes approximately a bell-shaped curve (strictly speaking, parabolic I believe), the North Sea peaked when it was about 50% depleted," was a slip-up with English, not math, I suppose. It was nice of him to reply.