Peak Affluence

[K-Dog]

M.King Hubbert predicted how oil depletion would work out.  Global poverty is on the rise.  Meaning global affluence is in decline and past peak.  You can, if you are creative, come up with a definition of affluence that says that an increase in poverty does not mean a decrease in affluence.  If you do that, I feel sorry for you.



No economist has the balls to do the same thing about affluence.  I posit the graphs have a similar shape and the world is now at peak affluence.  Affluence is a function of oil extraction.

The wealthiest 0.54 percent, about 40 million people, are responsible for 14 percent of lifestyle-related greenhouse gas emissions, while the bottom 50 percent of income earners, almost 4 billion people, only emit around 10 percent.  Extreme affluence results in extreme consumption.

The extreme affluent have names and addresses.  Try to not forget.

As the world runs out of carbon to generate CO2 with, global affluence MUST drop.  Affluence flows outwards into society from the wellhead, and the refinery.  As fossil fuel flow abates, so must affluence.

The world's top 10 percent of income earners are responsible for between 25 percent and 43 percent of our environmental impact. This is a direct result of hogging to themselves more than a fair share of resources by  one order of magnitude.  (The one with a 10 in it.)  The extremely affluent use several orders of magnitude more than their fair share.

Technological improvements have reduced emissions, but worldwide growth in affluence cancels all gains.  When technical improvement meets a capitalist market, mass production and low cost results in commodities that produce Jevons Paradox! 

Modest thought quickly shows there is no paradox at all.  Jevon's paradox is the direct result of commodification of improvements.  No capitalism, no Jevons Paradox.

Jevon's Paradox.-> Improvements that increase efficiency to conserve a resource results in more rapid consumption of the resource conserved. 

That is my definition and it is correct.  Some online definitions throw 'lowered price' into the definition.  That should not be there.  This definition does not and should not define a cause.  A definition says what something is.  Answering how it came to be answers another question.

A fish is surrounded by water on all sides.  Fish are in a sense, unaware of water.  Price is a function of a capitalist market when Jevons Paradox results.  Capitalism is the water.  Price is the fish.  Other kinds of markets prevent Jevons Paradox. 

Introducing price into a definition of Jevons paradox obscures that capitalism is the actual cause that produces a lowered price.  This is a common bait and switch technique that misdirect attention away from a contradiction of capitalism onto another cause.  Only a capitalist market results in Jevons Paradox.

This video does a good job at introducing the paradox without ever mentioning the water in which we swim.  The problem is that ignoring the 'C' word results in discussions which only talk about putting patches on the economic tire.  When in fact we need a new tire.  Patches will not work.  See if you can find the tire patches as you watch it.  They are there.  So many you can't see the tire at the end.

[monsta666]

Don't forget increased efficiency can lead to more total collapse and not less if not managed correctly. The way to see this is that being more energy resource efficient effectively results in the cost of energy per unit of work declining. Reduced costs make the less economically viable sources more viable so when the final collapse does eventually happen you are left with even less than had you persisted with less efficient means.

For example, a fisherman who only has a big net so can only catch a certain number of fish. If fish populations drop sufficiently then he will go out of business. However, if he manages to develop radar technology and other gadgets to track fish more easily he can go further out and catch more fish. His business remains viable for longer but if he persists long enough even that resource will be exhausted and now the total fish stock will be further depleted than if he just kept with the net. This is the danger with increased efficiency if you fail to consider the broader picture.

[TDoS]

M.King Hubbert predicted how oil depletion would work out. 

Ummm...that chart of oil production? It is of the US peak, he published it around 1956 and became famous for it. Just for the sake of accuracy and what was defined as working out, his number for 2024 looks to be about 600-700 million barrels/yr or so.

The right answer for 2024 is off the chart, above 4 billion a year. So if Hubbert predicted how oil depletion works out....apparently oil depletion disagrees.

[K-Dog]

M.King Hubbert predicted how oil depletion would work out. 

Ummm...that chart of oil production? It is of the US peak, he published it around 1956 and became famous for it. Just for the sake of accuracy and what was defined as working out, his number for 2024 looks to be about 600-700 million barrels/yr or so.

The right answer for 2024 is off the chart, above 4 billion a year. So if Hubbert predicted how oil depletion works out....apparently oil depletion disagrees.

No, Hubbbert was spot on.  All he ever talked about was CONVENTIONAL oil.  The technology to do fracking was around but the inside 'story' of fracking at that time was a secret kept by the oil companies.

I heard about fracking for the first time  in 1974.  The first oil crisis had just ended and I was working in a gas station and some guy came through.  I was talking about oil depletion even then.  To which this man told me that there was enough oil in rock under the Midwest plains to last hundreds of years.  He told me like he was revealing a secret.  I think he was.

It would have been irresponsible for Hubbert to speculate about how much fracked oil could contribute.  The technology was known about, but it had not been implemented.



Here a graph shows conventional oil WAS declining as predicted.  There is more than what Hubbert predicted, and I'll suggest the difference is only due to water injection.  Something else that would have been irresponsible to consider on that graph.  A graph which can only be about one thing.

The graph shows what will happen if oil is extracted by conventional means only.  That was the point, and to suggest (not by you, others could) that the graph could start out as one kind of oil and finish with another kind of oil is nothing but dim. There was no fracking in Hubbert's time.

Look at this graph and compare the values for 2008 before fracked oil became a thing.  Hubbert was not far off at all. Hubbert was right.  When the graph was drawn there was only one kind of oil.  Current raw numbers mean nothing without a qualification about what kind of oil is being talked about.

I watched a video about a rod-line pump jack that is likely the last one being used in Oklahoma yesterday.  It puts up a barrel and a half per day.  It is the  last pump jack on a rod line that once had three or four other pump jacks.  The oil is conventional oil about 450 meters down.  It supplies the needs of thirty Americans, but the line once served the needs of many more.  The jack has been pumping continuously since 1956 and was bought from a junkyard.  The owners of the lease bought and sold used oil equipment.  The Simplex pump was obsolete in 1956.  I did some research to find out what it was and how it worked.

That is the only kind of oil Hubbert was ever talking about.

I remember a line from I think.  'The Party's Over' by Richard Heinberg - "A hundred years from now somewhere someone will be pumping oil."

Perhaps someone will ride up on a horse in fifty years and the pump jack will be clanging away.

Guarded by a Boston Robotics robot with an M-16.

[TDoS]

No, Hubbbert was spot on.  All he ever talked about was CONVENTIONAL oil.  The technology to do fracking was around but the inside 'story' of fracking at that time was a secret kept by the oil companies.

Drawing upon Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels as a reference, I note the following.
A) I couldn't find the word "conventional" anywhere in the document, if you happen to know where it is, I would love a page quote?
B) He did however note this: Page 14: "The data in Figure 15 represent the estimated amounts of crude oil initially present which are producible by methods now in use."

These methods being wells, vertical and horizontal, offshore drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and stuff pretty much still being done today, except for one. Canadian tar sands, whereby oil is mined, the only unconventional oil on the planet currently, under Hubbert's definitions. Perhaps ultra-deep could be included, if we wish to split hairs over how deep is related to "now in use"?

And then you said this: "The technology to do fracking was around but the inside 'story' of fracking at that time was a secret kept by the oil companies."

To which I offer this: Mechanics of Hydraulic Fracturing Published by AIME in 1957. More interesting is when it was presented, October of 1956.

Hubbert's explicit knowledge of hydraulic fracturing, including calculating the physics of, as demonstrated here:"The technique was introduced to the Petroleum Industry in a paper by J. B. Clark, of the Stanolind Oil and Gas Co. in 1918, and since then its use has progressively expanded so that by the end of 1955 more than 100,000 individual treatments had been performed."

Hubbert's words, and understanding, not mine.

So in March of 1956, Hubbert is putting his ideas out in Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels in 1956. In October of that same year, he is discussing a practice around for a decade, and in the case of hydraulic fracturing, he has already been studying the physics of it, publishing on it, and it obviously can't be that much of a secret. I will admit that seriously, who reads AIME back then other than knowledgeable folks, but they wouldn't keep their mouths shut and hide it after reading it or seeing his presentation would they? Let alone the thing was being done all over Oklahoma and Texas and whatnot. A secret?

This is a great reference.. detailing both the initial hydrostatic shock technique patented near the end of the Civil War (not quite fracking but close) and the process began in the late 1940's that Hubbert knew about when he wrote his paper. And said reference details 1,000,000 hydraulic fracturing jobs by 1988. So before Colin Campbell declared global peak oil in 1990...he couldn't claim ignorance of hydraulic fracturing to explain his "egg on face" moment either.

No surprises here. Nothing hidden.
Reference

1947
The immediate post-war period saw the birth of modern-day fracking. In 1947, Floyd Farris of Stanolind Oil & Gas began a study on the relationship between oil and gas production output and the amount of pressurised treatment applied to each well. This study led to the first modern day example of hydraulic fracturing at the Hugoton gas field in Kansas which saw the technique used to extract natural gas from limestone.

During this experimental frack, 1,000 US gallons of napalm (gelled gasoline) was injected into the gas producing limestone formation with a depth of 2,400 feet. This was then followed up with a gel breaker to 'frack' the well. Unfortunately, this particular experiment was deemed a failure as it didn't lead to any significant increase in production. Nevertheless, the first modern frack had been carried out.

1949
In steps oilfield services giant Halliburton, which is still a major player in hydraulic fracturing today. In 1949, a patent was issued with an exclusive licence approved for the Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company. On March 17th that same year, the company carried out the first two successful commercial hydraulic fracturing treatments; one in Stephens county, Oklahoma, and another in Archer County, Texas.

It would have been irresponsible for Hubbert to speculate about how much fracked oil could contribute.  The technology was known about, but it had not been implemented.

Well, you might not consider someone paying for it to be done 100,000 times not implemented....but it sure sounds like "was only implemented 100,000 times" would be more accurate.

And him being a seminal expert in calculating the geophysics of the process in 1956 because...you know...he had data from 100,000 implementations. Perhaps you disagree that this was a large enough sample size for him to be an expert on the physics of it already?

It is my belief that the "conventional" angle came along sometime when it became obvious that Hubbert's US peak was in the process of being eclipsed. Not being happy with the best predictive example of the peak idea being so easily dispatched with oil from rocks that quite literally were part of the late 1800's development in the US (including the first US natural gas well in 1821), there was a need to find a scapegoat to defend the peak idea, someone not around to defend themselves.

I introduce the seminal geophysicist of his time...the patsy. All in order to maintain his idea, the bell shaped curve. Hubbert predicted the US peak....the idea works! When the "oh shit I don't know dick about petroleum geology!" moment arrives, well, up is down, black is white, 2+2=5, etc etc. Translated into peak speak, conventional oil becomes something no one can define in the way oil is ormally described by industry, chemical enginers, oil field people (API gravity, viscosity, impurities, color and price), and bell shaped curves win!

..psst...did you know that Hubbert, around 1936....predicted US peak oil to happen by 1950? I say psst because we should keep it a secret, because as it turns out...he wasn't right then either. I wonder why no peakers seem to know this? Takes away from the credibility of th 1970 call? This guy found it, and put it in his book. Mason Inman's book. The only other person that I've ever seen find this info other than a petroleum geologist from the USGS giving a presentation at a AAPG conference mentioning it in Tulsa in 2012, where he mentioned it.

The graph shows what will happen if oil is extracted by conventional means only. 

I'm more than happy to accept that as true. As soon as you find Hubbert making this distinction, because I quoted earlier his caveat. "producible by methods now in use" circa 1956. Canadian oil mining and perhaps really deep offshore would be the only "not conventional" oil on the planet. Horizontal wells date back pre-WWII, hydraulically fracturing just post WWII, offshore was happening post WWII, I mean, mining is about the only one I can think of that isn't "conventional". But hey, if you've got the quote from Hubbert, I'll buy in pronto. I'm not going to be accused of misrepresenting what the guy said or wrote.

There was no fracking in Hubbert's time.

Well, I think we both know better now.

Look at this graph and compare the values for 2008 before fracked oil became a thing. 

You mean, 1949 when hydraulically fracturing became a thing, and was done 100,000 times before some of us were born? I would also offer this...the EPA referenced the USGS which back in 2015 was already telling folks that 2/3's of ALL hydraulic fracturing had happened in the 20th centuy...NOT the 21st. And those pesky scientists, how did they know that hydraulically fracturing was happening before Hubbert wrote his 1956 peak oil paper when no one else seems to?

Approximately 1 million wells have been hydraulically fractured since the technique was first developed in the late 1940s (Gallegos and Varela, 2015;IOGCC, 2002). Roughly one third of those wells were hydraulically fractured between 2000 and approximately 2014.

Page 4, right side, top, located here.

Could be that we're talking REAL scientists, descendants of the line that include Hubbert himself!

Hubbert was not far off at all. Hubbert was right.  When the graph was drawn there was only one kind of oil.  Current raw numbers mean nothing without a qualification about what kind of oil is being talked about.

There are dozens of types of oil. Have been since before Hubbert was born probably. Described in all the appropriate ways. You haven't mentioned ANY of those characteristics for "coventional" other than how how deep it is?

You can say Hubbert was correct. It's a free country. You just can't point at his chart and say the answer there compared to amount of oil being produced today is a match. You can't put "conventional" in his mouth either...unless you can? A link to anything he said or wrote would work of course.

You can say that 0.6 billion barrels is the same number as 4.3 billions barrels....but I dunno....  0.6 = 4.3? I don't think I need to ask my first grade teacher who taught me some math once if this is a true statement or not.

I watched a video about a rod-line pump jack that is likely the last one being used in Oklahoma yesterday.  It puts up a barrel and a half per day.  It is the  last pump jack on a rod line that once had three or four other pump jacks. 

We called them shackle lines, once upon a time. I can take you to some woods along the Ohio Valley where a friend of mine runs 20 of them all wire roped together to a central prime mover in a shack  where he runs a gasoline engine to move all the lines to pump the wells. Oil was in the Ohio Valley long before hilljacks from Ohio and West Virginia and Pennsylvania moved to Oklahoma and began finding it for them.

The oil is conventional oil about 450 meters down. 

Do you have a chart or something from Hubbert that shows a chart at which depth conventional ends and everything else begins? Because that Canadian tar sand mining is all shallower than 450 meters, and there is no way it is conventional. According to HUbbert's definition of what he was adding up and what he was adding up in the future, circa 1956. Which doesn't use the word "conventional", but I've already quoted him so I won't do it again. So perhaps Hubbert put out a depth chart somewhere I'm not aware of?

That is the only kind of oil Hubbert was ever talking about.

Well then a single reference of him saying which oils are conventional, and how shallow they need to be could clear this all up! People say all sorts of things on the internet (remember the Mayan calendar thing?) but if the man himself made this distinction, well then it is a done deal!

Perhaps someone will ride up on a horse in fifty years and the pump jack will be clanging away.

Wells on grandma's old property, shale wells both, vertical and hydraulically fractured, are still producing these 46 years later. The shackle lines I mentioned previously? Handed down from grandfather to grandson. My buddy is 65 or so now. OG oilfield he is. I think the wells date back to post WWI and pre WWII. Shale oil as it turns out, migrated to some shallower sands, the wells were "shot" (hydraulic shock is another way to think of it, the 1865 patented technique mentioned above)somewhere back pre-WWII. Quite common in the area. 

[K-Dog]

If you want to make this an issue about who is right and who is wrong I'll just say you are right and I am wrong.

But I am only wrong from a particular point of view.

There is no point in looking for conventional oil in old writings because the distinction was not made before fracking became a significant part of production.  There was no distinction before that time.

You are totally right about fracking tech being around in Hubbert's time.  It was used 100,000 times by then.  Fine.

Fracking for production in the United States began in the early 21st century. However, it wasn't until around the mid-2000s that fracking technology advanced sufficiently to unlock vast reserves of oil and natural gas from shale formations. The increased production of oil from fracking significantly impacted domestic American production around that time.

And not before that time.

Fracking used before the 21st century was used to augment and improve conventional wells. 

Conventional wells being defined as wells that do not need fracking to produce oil. 

Conventional was an unnecessary and unused qualification before the  21st century.

If Hubbert was squaking about a peak in oil as early as 1936 good for him.  I don't see what it proves if he was or not.  Hubbert described the mathematics of oil depletion.  The mathematics he described is essentially correct.  If the math were wrong, Hubbert would be a Bozo and we would not even be talking about him.

All that matters is if Hubbert correctly described the math or not.  He did.

The oil is conventional oil about 450 meters down.

That refers to the Oklahoma well in the video only.

Interesting tidbit about 1936.  You wonder if peak oilers know about his earlier claim.

I wonder if the climate collapse crowd knows about Guy Mcphearson's mud hut days.  Before he decided to exaggerate the danger of the arctic methane deposits way beyond any reasonable credibility, Guy was hard core peak oil.  With a doomstead in Arizona.

Oil depletion does not pay as well as the methane bomb does on the dinner theater circuit. 

Like the original Diners, I watched Guy change his tune.  But that switcheroo can't compare to Hubbert because your claim is that Hubbert was humming the same tune earlier.  Not a different one.  So what is the point.  If Hubbbert had earlier insight, good for him.

I might sill have Guy's mud hut book if I look hard enough.  It has a white cover.  Like the suits he likes to wear.

[K-Dog]

M. King Hubbert joined the staff of Columbia University in 1931 and met Howard Scott. Hubbert and Scott co-founded Technocracy Incorporated in 1933, with Scott as leader and Hubbert as secretary.

Scott saw government and industry as wasteful and unfair, believing that an economy run by engineers would be efficient and equitable.

Scott called for an economic system based on how much energy it takes to produce goods.  Virtually unknown today, the organization boasted over half a million members in California at its peak in the 1930s and 1940s.

update:

****************************************************************************

The Oracle of Oil: A Maverick Geologist's Quest for a Sustainable Future




In 1956, geologist and Shell Oil researcher Marion King Hubbert delivered a speech that has shaped world energy debates ever since. Addressing the American Petroleum Institute, Hubbert dropped a bombshell on his audience: U.S. oil production would peak by 1970 and decline steadily thereafter. World production would follow the same fate, reaching its peak soon after the turn of the millennium. In battles stretching over decades, Hubbert defended his forecasts against opponents from both the oil industry and government. Hubbert was proved largely correct during the energy crises of the 1970s and hailed as a "prophet" and an "oracle." Even amid our twenty-first-century fracking boom, Hubbert's underlying logic holds true—while remaining a source of debate and controversy.

A rich biography of the man behind peak oil, The Oracle of Oil follows Hubbert from his early days as a University of Chicago undergraduate to his first, ill-fated forays into politics in the midcentury Technocracy movement, and charts his rise as a top geologist in the oil industry and energy expert within the U.S. government. In a deeply researched narrative that mines Hubbert's papers and correspondence for the first time, award-winning journalist Mason Inman rescues the story of a man who shocked the scientific community with his eccentric brilliance. The Oracle of Oil also skillfully situates Hubbert in his era: a time of great intellectual ferment and discovery, tinged by dark undercurrents of intellectual witch hunts. Hubbert emerges as an unapologetic iconoclast who championed sustainability through his lifelong quest to wean the United States—and the wider world—off fossil fuels, as well as by questioning the pursuit of never-ending growth.

In its portrait of a man whose prescient ideas still resonate today, The Oracle of Oil looks to the past to find a guiding philosophy for our future.


I found a copy for $6.48 total with shipping.  It should be here in two weeks.

[TDoS]

But I am only wrong from a particular point of view.

I'm game to think of it that way. I would argue that my point of view involved documentation, history and the facts that are on point. I will happily absorb other facts disputing mine of course, as I would learn from that.

There is no point in looking for conventional oil in old writings because the distinction was not made before fracking became a significant part of production.  There was no distinction before that time.

I can completely agree with that point, although I haven't searched the literature to find out its first use. I hypothesized its origin in my post, because your statement is most likely true.

You are totally right about fracking tech being around in Hubbert's time.  It was used 100,000 times by then.  Fine.

Fracking for production in the United States began in the early 21st century.

Sorry, you can't say your first sentence and then the second, they are contradictory. Fracking wasn't being done as an experiment 100,000 times before 1956, it was being done for production. Perhaps you mean, "Sure fracking has been around for 75 years but the contribution from the process wasn't noticeable until it began to show results noticeable at the national level". Better?

However, it wasn't until around the mid-2000s that fracking technology advanced sufficiently to unlock vast reserves of oil and natural gas from shale formations. The increased production of oil from fracking significantly impacted domestic American production around that time.

Improving fracking technology, in combination with better geologic understanding of the need for areal extensive and generally non-lacustrine brittle shales with a permeability high enough under generation lithostatic pressures to allow oil to escape to surrounding and/or vertically shallower reservoir rocks, and low enough to keep the oil/gas in the source rock after generation pressures mitigated with prior migration.

Throw in horizontal wells and its like liquid nitroglycerine of old well torpedoes!

And not before that time.

Not quite. Your perspective originates from the lack of visibility of results in terms of GROWTH, therefore the million frack jobs in the 20th century weren't doing anything. But they were...you just couldn't see it. All the folks doing it could see it of course, but the outsiders couldn't because US crude oil volumes weren't going up. What was actually happening is that underlying decline from all fields and wells in America were being mitigated. During the peak oil heyday early this centry there were people who knew and spoke of these things, some were at peakoil.com talking about exactly what was going on. Because they had done it, knew it was being done, had increased production at the company level, but what was happening was that this new production was mitigating decline. Instead of the US collapsing into a 1 mmbbl/d country by 1980, fracking was happily allowing new oil all over the place...just not enough. Yet.

Think of it like the wind...you can't see it...but it is still there...doing its thing. You are arguing that you only notice wind when it is a hurricane. The folks involved in developement of shale going back to at least the 70's did see it, even if others couldn't. But some early detractors of peak oil certainly did. And some even talked about it over at peakoil.com, because they knew the wind was blowing. Just not hard enough. Yet.

b]Conventional wells being defined as wells that do not need fracking to produce oil.[/b] 

Shale wells don't need fracking to produce oil. They just didn't produce enough to make them economical without it. And how do you define "fracking"? The "old" wells, did you see my reference where "shooting" a well was a precursor to hydraulic fracturing, and itself is a form of hydrostatic shock to "frack" a well? It just doesn't do it in a measured way, and odds are that Oklahoma well you referenced...it was probably a "shot" well as most of them were. Those old wells wouldn't produce enough to be economic either. Without being hydraulically "shocked" in a less controllable way than the modern version of fracturing the rock. Natural gushers are picturesque, but were early in oil development in the US, and shallow, and by the end of the Civil War hydraulic shock was needed to shove water against the rock to "frack" it.

Shooting the Well: The Petroleum Torpedoes of the Early Oil Fields Almost immediately after we started drilling wells, we started fracturing the rocks underground to increase the flow of fossil fuels.

Would you like to take a stab at defining fracking? Hydrostatic shock is different than hydraulic fracturing, but are doing the same thing though, one being more effective than the other, one a shock, the other a process. Not sure there is a practical difference other than hydraulic fracturing is better.And is younger, having been around for maybe 75 years. Versus 159 years for shooting a well.

Conventional was an unnecessary and unused qualification before the  21st century.

Could be true. So a colloquialism was invented to help joe citizen try and figure things out, "where is this oil coming from!". One of those words where everyone nods vigorously and seems to think they understand. Industry didn't call them any of this nonsense, they called them wells "that came in natural", like Spindletop, and "shot holes", involving applying a hydrostatic shock. And then the follow on improvement was hydraulic fracturing. Safer too. Liquid nitro...ouch.

Along the way we got conventional and unconventional. Have to make it easy for those who don't know a kelly bushing from a monkey board.

If Hubbert was squaking about a peak in oil as early as 1936 good for him.

Indeed. But peakers react poorly to the fact that The Man didn't get it right out of the gate, but was already working on his peak #2 call himself. The belief system needs him to have nailed peak oil in the US to support slapping bell shaped curves on everything.

I don't see what it proves if he was or not.  Hubbert described the mathematics of oil depletion.

No he did not. He described CYCLES of oil development. Bell shaped curves don't exist to describe well decline, project decline, or field decline. If you stylise them....eh....still severely lacking. But they SOMETIMES can describe one cycle of development flowing to another and another, as discovery and economics and increasing demand needing more supply all play out. The US just happening to be the best example of these sequences of economics and growth and discovery and better technology and moving to off shore drilling and so on and so forth. Best example on the planet. Until it wasn't.

Here is an example of how experts who know all this model it. Certainly curves and whatnot, but flat on the top, long declines afterwards, and all the math and explanations anyone might ever want. They appear to know more about this than any peaker book/article/youtube video I've ever seen.oil and Gas Supply Model

The mathematics he described is essentially correct.  If the math were wrong, Hubbert would be a Bozo and we would not even be talking about him.

Hubbert's math is on Page 10, here.

If by "essentially" you can configure his equations on Page 10 to make multiple peaks in sequence then fine. I'm not a mathematician, but maybe you've had advance training in the field. 

All that matters is if Hubbert correctly described the math or not.  He did.

See above, and let us know when you can get two maxima out of his equations, the second larger than the first. I can't do it.

Interesting tidbit about 1936.  You wonder if peak oilers know about his earlier claim.

I do. Mason Inman does. The person I learned it from did. But really, if a peak oiler had found out, did they instantly mentally misfire from the overwhelming cognitive dissonance, and instantly forget it because it didn't fit within the belief system?

I wonder if the climate collapse crowd knows about Guy Mcphearson's mud hut days.  Before he decided to exaggerate the danger of the arctic methane deposits way beyond any reasonable credibility, Guy was hard core peak oil.  With a doomstead in Arizona.

I'll bet real climate scientists know about Guy. He was hard core peak oil. Just as Kuntsler started with Y2K, Guy with peak oil. Then Kuntsler jumps to peak oil, Guy jumps to climate. Guy migrated to Belize. Then it turns out it was hot, and he sold the place and moved to upstate New England somewhere. Vermont maybe? Somewhere up there. Was disavowed by regular people for..well... claims of a sexual nature.

But that switcheroo can't compare to Hubbert because your claim is that Hubbert was humming the same tune earlier.

In 1936 he also claimed there might be multiple peaks along the way to the peak in 1950. 

Hubbert was brilliant, and did seminal work in hydrology, rock mechanics and geophysical everything, reserve growth in existing fields, and the development of an idea that bears his name.
His first call was wrong, he would have known that in 1956. And his response was a beautiful genius science mind at work. He learned from just claiming the idea in 1936, knew it was wrong, and in Round #2 he decided to prove it, with what he knew in the day. With examples, with argument, with data on resources, with math and graphics.

The quality of his work wasn't discredited by it ultimately being wrong, it was validated because of how long it actually held up before folks could honestly question it. And under the conditions it was built with...it held up. The first clue validating and making him more famous it was the US peak, and he didn't live to see his world prediction discredited. So he could take his 30+ year accomplishment to his grave.

He was wrong, we know this in hindsight, but we also know why. He only had 2 of the 3 parts of the puzzle. One additional field of science was needed to close the loop. Economics. Geology, technology/engineering, and economcs, the trifecta needed to solve peak oil. Combine the three of those, adn you're golden.  

[K-Dog]

claims of a sexual nature.

Another blast from the past.  A good guru has to be good enough so the women will not want to complain.

The book on Hubbert will be interesting.

[TDoS]

Conventional was an unnecessary and unused qualification before the  21st century.

Could be true.

I would like to officially answer this question beyond "could be".

It kept me up last night...not my glib attitude about why Joe Average Peak Oiler not knowing anything might lead them to just the easiest thing to remember...but I knew there was a better answer. And there was.

The word "conventional" in the geoscience world only gained meaning, hell only became possible after something else happened FIRST. Otherwise your point applies....no one knew any better and things just WERE. There was no need for "conventional" as a definition because everything was the same, even if resources were being developed in the late 1800's that were this thing NOW called something else, the word for it is usually "unconventional".

The something that came along happened in the mid to late 1980's. Geologists working for the USGS noticed something in their work along the Rocky Mountains, at the time they referred to it as "basin centered gas accumulations". It was weird because it defied petroleum geology principles of buoyancy, gas shouldn't be trapped under formation water, it should have migrated through geologic time and been trapped as a gas cap like in "conventional" reservoirs (now accurately described as "discrete reservoirs"). 

Chuck Spencer and Ben Law worked out the geology and first supposed the idea and words (basin centered gas accumulation), and by 2000 the idea was being used to find, describe and allow people to think about this different type of accumulation. Like here .

USGS literature and results are themselves sprinkled with phrases like "unconventional basin centered gas accumulation" and whatnot, they didn't initially convert over to the new term until more early this century.

And then the words began showing up on their official forms, as to what it was they were evaluating.
Here is Bob's writeup on the method.

The peakers never stopped to ask any geology questions, for them it was bell shaped curves and MZBs and doom and whatnot, and most folks still can't get away from the conventional/uconventional monikers. The words have been replaced of course now, by those who understand these things, the shakeout by around 2010 arrived at "discrete reservoirs" and "continuous accumulations". I think the USGS method for discrete reservoirs never lost the "conventional" title on their forms. In part because I don't think they ever changed their methodology either.

Here is a reference to USGS 2002 resource assessment work sort of mixing and matching the terms, 2nd paragraph under the "Resource Summary" sub-title.

So that is the correct answer. Not "could be", but HAD to be when a new geologic concept cropped up, created something else, rendering all the old stuff "conventional" (meaning old stuff we all think we know what it is because its old and been around awhile) and the new stuff easily became the "unconventional", which stuck and that term is still used, incorrectly, today.

The correct answer is that there are discrete oil and gas accumulations and continuous oil aad gas resources. They have both been hydro shocked and hydraulically fracked since about 1865 when the shock process was invented, and both types of accumulations are improved by either process. Lower quality and deeper rocks in the continuous resource plays came to dominate US oil and gas production starting in the late 1980's in the Antrim Shale of northern Michigan. It was economic only with hydraulic fracturing, and the precursor to what happened next. Whereas early and shallow development of both discrete reservoirs and the same continuous type systems found in the Devonian sections in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virgina easily coughed up plenty of oil, discrete shallow sands and shales turning the Tri-State area into the Middle East of the world back in the 1860-1880's. All with water in the hole and liquid nitroglycerine to have an incompressible fluid to frack the rock.

The Antrim Shale development starting in the late 1980's was the key for the folks watching this stuff, who 15 years later had seen both that, the development of continuous resources in the Rockies, the early Barnett development in the Newark Easy field, the spreading of the Cotton Valley and some Wilcox development throughout the old Carthage field, etc etc. Armed with this history it became quite easy for those who knew this to contradict right from the beginning those who claimed peak oil was the end all be all early in the 21st century.

[K-Dog]

It seems to me it is easy to get lost in the details.  Like watching doom porn.  If frogs on a slow boil in a pot had phones they would show each other You-Tube videos of other cooking frogs until they all passed out.The point is:

• That there has been a peak in oil extraction.
• That modern life became dependent on oil for food shelter and clothing.
• The consequence of oil peaking is an end to modern life and mass death.

And we do NOT have a Logical Fallacy.

If you can find a logical flaw in the above.  Point it out.  Good Luck, you will need it.

[TDoS]

It seems to me it is easy to get lost in the details.

Hasn't that always been so? However, sometimes it is referred to as research, and can come in handy. Sometimes, a process or thing can't even happen with the level of details necessary to understand the entire system. Nuclear egineer types running a reactor where the cost of NOT knowing details can be a meltdown?

Like watching doom porn.  If frogs on a slow boil in a pot had phones they would show each other You-Tube videos of other cooking frogs until they all passed out.The point is:

• That there has been a peak in oil extraction.
• That modern life became dependent on oil for food shelter and clothing.
• The consequence of oil peaking is an end to modern life and mass death.

Nice list. I noticed there was no temporal component hinted at? For the record, we are 6 years past peak oil now, and global peak oil in 1979 went about 15 years without triggering #2 or #3.

If you can find a logical flaw in the above.  Point it out.  Good Luck, you will need it.

No need. It is as reasonable as "Sun goes out. Humans die 9 minutes later."

But there are 2 obvious hiccups in the logic.

A) #2 and #3 hardly require a peak oil(s) as the trigger, they are just generic human dieoff consequences for
 (fill in favorite reason). There are far more efficient and better #1's in the doomer porn world at triggering #2 and #3. Some manmade, some not, but the list of better triggers is huge and far cooler. Real pandemics, nuke war, GRB, yellowstone going boom, crop failures because of climate change on a global scale, continental sized flood basalts, so on and so forth.

B) We've gone 15 years past peak oil before, so #2 and #3 would seem to need to sit farther out than 15 years. Given that, and the age of most of us here, we'll be feeding the worms before we need to worry about it at all.

A quick generic question, is everyone here except me (2 kids) and Monsta (youngster) an old fart with no kids? I don't ever recall folks talking about their kids and what doomer advice they are giving them and if they are taking it from their parents. Especially when the consequences of the current peak oil reach out into the unknown only 9 years from now.