Peak Oil News

In his 2006 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush declared that the U.S. is a nation “addicted to oil” and vowed to take steps to reduce Middle Eastern imports by 75 percent by 2025. After a summer of $3-plus gasoline, most of us would see this as a good idea. But it may be too late. According to a growing cadre of petroleum geologists, the days of cheap oil are over. At issue is a concept called Hubbert's Peak, named for former oil-company geologist M. King Hubbert. In 1956, Hubbert made a bold prediction. Oil production in the Lower 48 states, he said, would peak in the early 1970s and decline forever after. He proved, if anything, slightly too optimistic: the actual peak occurred in 1970. » Source: SignOnSanDiego.com More recently, Kenneth Deffeyes, a retired geophysics ...

The logistic curve, and its derivative the hubbert's curve, has been widely used to model population growth. And it has been applied to model oil production by M. King Hubbert. The model comes from the following differential equation: dQ/dt=kQ(1-Q/URR) where Q(t) is a function of time (measured in years) and it is defined as the cumulative production of a region until the end of year t. The parameter URR is the "Ultimately Recoverable Resources" or the maximum cumulative production that can be reached. K is the Malthusian parameter or the maximum cumulative production growth. » Source: GraphOilogy The value dQ/dt for a specific year's, can be approximated by (Q(s)-Q(s-1))/(s-(s-1))= Q(s)-Q(s-1) which is the production of year's, so let us define P(t)=Q(t)-Q(t-1). Let us assume that we have a region where the oil production follows strictly the logistic model, and ...

U.S. Rep. Tom Udall and others in Congress have positioned themselves at the center of an uncomfortable idea: Eventually the planet will run out of fossil fuels. Udall is pushing for open discussion of peak oil, the concept that world-oil production will someday reach an all-time high. After that, oil production will decline because there’s only so much of it in the ground. Oil production has already peaked in the United States at more than 3.5 billion barrels per year in 1970, just as a geophysicist predicted in the 1950s. Last year’s domestic production was about 1.8 billion barrels. Some energy experts say a permanent fuel crunch could be a disaster for the global economy because this decline in production would most likely happen at the same time that demand reaches an all-time high. » Source: New Mexican Government reports have suggested that widespread ...

Oil, uranium, gold and platinum are more sought after than ever today. The search for natural resources is becoming increasingly difficult and prices are soaring. But future growth of the world economy depends on these natural resources -- and some will soon disappear forever. Five minutes before he was scheduled to speak, leading geologist Marion King Hubbert was summoned to the phone. His employer was speaking, someone from the headquarters of the Shell corporation. He was urged not to present his forecast, Hubbert later revealed. But the scientist with his little Clark-Gable-style beard stuck to his guns, as he has often been known to do. When he appeared at the spring 1956 meeting of the American Petroleum Institute in San Antonio, he presented exactly what he had prepared ...