I had a howl at reading Simmon's book "Twighlight in the Desert". Chock full of technical errors. I can't believe he didn't get a petroleum engineer + geologist to do some proof reading and editing on the manuscript.
Having given him a little disrespect above I do think however that his basic thesis is correct; albeit the timing he presents may be out by a decade or more.
I believe Simmons presented to the legendary Energy Task Force that was led by Cheney. So that task force had a full blast of peak oil thinking. Helps explain the foreign policy of the Cheney/Bush Administration.
Nice challenge to lay out Wintler2. Since you posted I've been waiting for some real technical arguments that Hubbert was just dreaming all this Peak Oil shit up.
And I don't mean arguments like "they've said it before and been wrong" or ad hominum attacks. I mean some real arguments that make the case that depletion is not occurring in established oil and gas fields and/or that discovery rates of new reserves is not slowing down. Some data would be nice; preferably in the form of pressure, production rates, and watercuts in producing oil fields so we can all see these infinite fields in action.
If anyone wants to play the abiotic oil card, please provide some estimates of abiotic recharge rate of reservoirs and some methodology around how the estimations are made. (Yeah abiotic hydrocarbons are real; however I've never seen any influence from such hydrocarbons in any reservoirs I've studied so if they are seeping in it is really, really, really slow)
For anyone's interest this is a good quick primer for estimating reserves with material balance - just to show that reserves figures are hard to nail down but aren't entirely pulled out of thin air:
http://www.ipt.ntnu.no/~kleppe/TPG4150/matbal.pdf
I looked but couldn't find a nice introductory primer online for decline curve analysis, or volumetric estimations. If anyone is truly interested I'm sure I can get some material together.
Funny, I was just doing some year end reserve estimations on dozen or so gas pools and after careful consideration of the amount of gas produced, reservoir pressures, phase characteristics of the reservoir fluids I was able to match both the original gas in place to the volumetrics of the reservoirs deduced by drilling results and 3D seismic and the reserves deduced by production decline techniques. And amazingly, no infinite reservoirs. No abiotic seepage keeping the reservoirs full unfortunately LOL.
Believe it or not there are people who actually understand these topics, and considering the economic importance of the subject the physics of the matter of oil and natural gas recovery are fairly (although not completely!) understood.
Sorry for my tone in this post. I just get so damned sick of reading people's opinions on topics that they know sweet jack shit about. Of course knowing almost nothing about a topic doesn't stop such people from speaking with such confidence that they know all the answers because they read about something for a few minutes on the internet. So when Wintler2 dropped the glove I thought I might see the legions of the unknowing step up and was looking forward to some laughs, but alas so far no one's stepping up to provide them.
Oh well, back to the spelunking thread which is far more interesting anyways.