Quote from: RE on Feb 09, 2026, 06:25 PM

Quote from: TDoS on Feb 09, 2026, 04:26 PMName anyone else who solved all future peak oils.

Nobody has "solved" Peak Oil, anymore than they have solved the problems of the Atmospheric CO₂, the Federal Deficit, Palestinian Genocide, Falling Birthrates or Donald Trump.

RE

You are quite incorrect. There were 3 up and running systems that I am aware one, one commercial, one available for a price out of Palo Alto, and the one I was asked to build. You can buy results from the first two if you know who has them, but not mine. These can't be the only 3, but are just the ones I have access to, have built, or been asked to stress test before commercial sales.

The first commerical system was deterministic in nature, working from central tendency inputs, delivering scenario based answers...."if I assume this price path, what is production potential, and for what length of time". Completely manual, price path of hydrocarbons being the only input variable. Maybe you could control the probability estimate in countries that supplied them under the PRMS system.

The second is an LP, working with proprietary economic assumptions and some really poor resource assumptions, simplistic resource cost curves, deterministic in terms of volumes. Lacking any decent engineering component, building stochastic outputs primarily based on variable price paths. Primrily econometric in nature, not enough detail on the resource side.

Mine is stochastic, based on the three main moving dimensions to the peak oil problem. Lets call them #1, #2 and #3. In order to solve it for any two of these dimensions, you assume a deterministic answer to the third. You iterate on the two until you have a 3 dimensional equilibrium. You change #1 slightly, and do it again. And again. And again. You develop an envelope of performance for the combination of a single changing variable. Then you make #2 dimension the changing variable, and iterate. And then #3. You then have a database of substantial size containing as many pertubations of the underlying data as you'd like...or are willing to wait for. It does take awhile.

The trick wasn't in the overall design, I use this technique for quite a few routines, the trick was in then assembling all this data into a matrix of outcomes for a given input that was possible to display to the user, and not screwing it up with cross correlations and weird dependencies. Once you ran it initially, you tracked down combinations that were ridiculous, and began to fine tune the working input ranges in order for a high price to intersect reserves and resources at a country level, not get too crazy over kerogen, stuff like that.

Call it teething problems. Took 6 months to figure out how to use it intelligently and display the statistical outcomes for any given input assumption. What does world oil look like with high prices, low resources, political instability in OPEC, wars, higher taxes in which countries or region, Venezuela comes off the board because no one wants heavy crude, how much oil can come from Russian LTO in the Bazhenov and under what geopolitical circumstances and resulting price consequences, and so on and so forth.

Took 2 years to design. Another year to build. Six months to debug. Cost mid 7 figures. After debugging and testing it with our own scenarios of whatifs, spewing out scenarions and liklihoods based on what WE thought were interesting scenarios, we built a control system on top of it. The user gave the control system a global volume path, and it would work backwards to figure out the price combinations necessary to figure out where the oil and gas comes from (it did 8 hydrocarbon products I believe). You put in a given price for all countries for all 8 products, and it would take everything it already knew and reverse calculate out all the volumes by country. And if you ran it bunches of times, you could develop a range of outcome for all products and prices based on given input ranges of prices or volumes.

Please. Didn't solve peak oil. And by the time it was solved, prices had crashed and nobody even cared anymore. I still run it on occasion, just for fun to see how it looks compared to what happened since its completion. Nearly all top level global run results did come up with an interesting answer, one in particular that tended to cross all scenarios, or all reasonable, non war, non political nonsense scenarios anyway. And these years later, we are approaching that point. If it pans out, I will be quite happy and consider the model validated.

Didn't even need the PhD Harvard mathematician involved, but he did pimp the idea to the right people to get the money.   

Makes the Limits to Growth models look like a Model T if I do say so myself.

That's not the problem with Peak Oil.  The problem is that it's a finite resource essential to the operation of industrial civilization there currently is no good replacement for and we are running short of it.

Currently, the only "solution" is to take countries like Cuba and cutting off their supply and sending them back to the Stone Age, thus resulting in a rapidly dwindling number of living Cubans and an increasing number of dead ones.  The solution  is not too popular with Cubans, nor is it popular with Ukrainians. Palestinians, Somalians, Venezuelans and numerous other countries currently at war over this finite resource.

RE

QuoteThat's not the problem with Peak Oil.  The problem is that it's a finite resource essential to the operation of industrial civilization there currently is no good replacement for and we are running short of it.

Concern about the actual peak is like looking at a tree and not seeing the forest.

You can add Americans who have no medical care to your list of unfortunates.

Ukrainians. Palestinians, Somalians, Venezuelans and Joe Six Pack.

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Quote from: RE on Feb 10, 2026, 06:29 PMThat's not the problem with Peak Oil.  The problem is that it's a finite resource essential to the operation of industrial civilization there currently is no good replacement for and we are running short of it.

Of course. The same as every other important non-renewable resource. But for some reason folks got their knickers in a twist over this particular one, and made it popular. And then fled like scalded cats when it turns out they didn't know even the most basic things about a single non-renewable resource.

I viewed it as a technical challenge that fit my skill set, as I already knew folks were getting it wrong 20 years ago, if not more, and took a crack at it.

I'm not a doomer, a class of folks that put the same level of thought into peak oil as they did Planet X and the Mayan calendar. I didn't feel like becoming an astronomist or learning ancient Mayan language to figure out if those were ridiculous as well, so I took advantage of the skillset I had.

Turns out it works well with other econometric models.

Quote from: RECurrently, the only "solution" is to take countries like Cuba and cutting off their supply and sending them back to the Stone Age, thus resulting in a rapidly dwindling number of living Cubans and an increasing number of dead ones.  The solution  is not too popular with Cubans, nor is it popular with Ukrainians. Palestinians, Somalians, Venezuelans and numerous other countries currently at war over this finite resource.

RE

Well, I'm not sure what problem you are solving by sending any country back to the stone age via lack of oil, but I would point out that a nice young lady wrote a peak oil book about how Cuba survived peak oil already. So I had my solution for the world, and she trumpeted how Cuba solved that problem decades ago.

How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. Circa 2006

Quote from: K-Dog on Feb 10, 2026, 06:46 PM

QuoteThat's not the problem with Peak Oil.  The problem is that it's a finite resource essential to the operation of industrial civilization there currently is no good replacement for and we are running short of it.

Concern about the actual peak is like looking at a tree and not seeing the forest.

Apt metaphor from a doomer perspective. But I'm not a doomer. And after we survived the Great DieOff proclaimed by the doomers during Earth Day 1970 (allegedly sometime by the 1980's) I figured you had to take their predictions with a grain of salt. As any thinking person might.

Quote from: K-DogLayoffs have surged to a nearly 20-year high, as job openings plummet.

Well, it has been awhile since we've had a hard recession. The Great Recession of 2008 was deeply involved in peak oil doom, folks who didn't know how to calculate peak oil randomly assigning it causality with any current event they could find.

The good news is that we aren't anywhere near RE's definition of collapse even with layoffs surging. A 20 year high puts it worse then Covid though doesn't it? Which was according to some the Biggest Recession Since the Great Depression. So we could be in for interesting times.

If it craters the market like the 2008 recession, I'll be dumping in available coinage just like I did back then.

Quote from: TDoS on Feb 10, 2026, 07:02 PMWell, I'm not sure what problem you are solving by sending any country back to the stone age via lack of oil

Oil not burned by Cubans available for Happy Motoring Amerikans.

Not sure what problem you are solving either.    Feel free to pat yourself on the back for whatever it is you think you did though.

RE

Quote from: RE on Feb 10, 2026, 09:28 PM

Quote from: TDoS on Feb 10, 2026, 07:02 PMWell, I'm not sure what problem you are solving by sending any country back to the stone age via lack of oil

Oil not burned by Cubans available for Happy Motoring Amerikans.

Not sure what problem you are solving either.    Feel free to pat yourself on the back for whatever it is you think you did though.

RE

I know what I did. I don't "think" I know what I did.

Quote from: TDoS on Feb 11, 2026, 04:39 AMI know what I did. I don't "think" I know what I did.

Well, I Googled "Who solved the Peak Oil problem" and top of the results and the closest I came to an answer was The Clean-Energy Equation No One Can Solve Yet, so your solution hasn't been pinged yet by their search bots.  Nobody on Reddit seemed to have heard of it either.  You seem to be a Legend in your own Mind.

RE

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Quote from: RE on Feb 11, 2026, 09:43 AMYou seem to be a Legend in your own Mind.

RE

You appear to have presumed it was built for public consumption. What a quaint idea. As far as being a legend...the folks that asked me to tackle this project never asked Colin or Jean to tackle the problem, or Ugo, or Gail, or Art, or Nate or Simone or anyone you've ever interviewed.

I was sitting there with a nice lady from the Sloan Foundation after a conference in DC, neither of us were speaking, just participating on panels and whatnot. She speaks 3 languages, has 2 PhDs, a native Russian who had migrated west during her career. She was waiting for a flight and I was waiting for a ride, so we were just hanging out. 

We had bumped into each other before, she had seen my presentations at various conferences during the early shale years, I had asked her to review my publications as a technical reviewer on at least 3 occasions, etc etc.


She had bumped into me at other national conferences and was intrigued by the various topics I had presented  and published on, particularly the heavy tilt towards practical applications. I was telling idle jokes based on my online experience among peakers, she was familiar with the type and we had a giggle fest with what we had learned about them. She had a project that needed done and the money to make it happen.

....NAH....I was probably just chosen out of the phone book at random....  😀😀

Quote....NAH....I was probably just chosen out of the phone book at random....  😀😀

Did she make America great again 🍑🍆   ?

Yes, of course.  Your world shattering "solution" to one of the most vexing problems facing humanity remains hidden on some TOP SECRET, air-gapped computer 40 floors below ground in a safe with 3 meter thick depleted uranium walls available only to a select few corporate executives protected from search engine spiders.

If there REALLY was a solution to Peak Oil, it would be published in a major peer reviewed journal and picked up afterward by Scientific American for popular reading.  It would be subject to at least SOME discussion and review on the Peak Oil discussion forums.

When some anonymous Troll on a nearly invisible website claims he solved Peak Oil, why on earth would anyone believe him? 🙄

RE

Quote from: K-Dog on Feb 11, 2026, 08:37 PMDid she make America great again 🍑🍆  ?

Nope. But when my model was integrated with others, it was interesting to learn and watch. Plus the gig paid well.

Quote from: RE on Feb 12, 2026, 04:12 AMYes, of course.  Your world shattering "solution" to one of the most vexing problems facing humanity remains hidden on some TOP SECRET, air-gapped computer 40 floors below ground in a safe with 3 meter thick depleted uranium walls available only to a select few corporate executives protected from search engine spiders.

Nope. It went into action,and core components of it were used for years, I was occasionally asked to consult. I think the project was finally shut down a year or so ago. Ran on local servers, in Python, I've got a copy of my work leftover from the development days.

Talking to you about me made me go check my backups to see if I still have it. I could probably ask permission to publish, but peak oil happened like in 2018 and no one even talks about it anymore. Plus it work better with an integrated socio-economic engine, as opposed to just generating probability answers based on custom scenarios.

Quote from: REIf there REALLY was a solution to Peak Oil, it would be published in a major peer reviewed journal and picked up afterward by Scientific American for popular reading.

Been there. Done that. Not this work. I only wrote up a single result, it is in the public eye, but it wasn't oriented on peak oil at all. Once integrated within a larger ecoonomic context it was great for full socio-economic scenarios, regional or global, but no one gave a shit about the peak oil potential except me. I ran so many scenarios through the thing I can't even remember them all now.

Quote from: REIt would be subject to at least SOME discussion and review on the Peak Oil discussion forums.

Sure. This one. The others are dead except for peakoil.com

Quote from: REWhen some anonymous Troll on a nearly invisible website claims he solved Peak Oil, why on earth would anyone believe him? 🙄
RE

Facts don't require your belief. They just are. You are free to discount every word I say, as you always have. Previously when I mentioned Sun Tzu, you missed the point I was making entirely. I want you to just keep right on being comfortable with what you think you know. In your absolute certainty in yourself is my anonymity. 

Facts don't require belief, but they do need to be present.  There are no facts here, only your CLAIM that you solved Peak Oil.

The only thing I found on your link to PeakOil.com related to Peak Oil was a link to an article on OilPrice.com by David Messler titled Why the IEA is Wrong About Peak Oil Demand.  A pretty good review of the estimates from the IEA and OPEC and the continuing dependence on oil to maintain and grow GDP.  Sadly, it doesn't provide a solution to Peak Oil.

Feel free to keep pimping yourself and blowing your own horn, although when you make claims like you solved Peak Oil you need to be able to back it up or you'll spend some time in the cooler contemplating your personality deficiencies.

RE