Norway offshore depletion

I gave a shot at modeling the Norway depletion curves starting from the Laherrere discovery data.

In the oil shock simulation, I used means of 5 years for the fallow, construction, and maturation periods, and a 10% depletion rate for years up to 1992. After 1992, like for the UK, I doubled the extraction rate over a 10+ year period. The fit is decent and it gives much more insight than the questionably derived logistic curve formulations.

Unshocked -- 10%

Shocked -- 10% to 20%

Note how close the profile of the shock perturbation approaches that of the UK North Sea model (chart to the right). In both cases, the increases in extraction rate occurred right around 1992, and essentially targeted the same 3 MBls/day sustainable production rate (competitive pressures perhaps?).

Like in the UK, the Norway model shows how the offshore areas can suffer rapid depletion. From the range of the parameters, the Brits developed and matured their rigs much more quickly than the Norwegians. The necessary increase in the extraction rates as the production curves started leveling off in the early 1990's became quite obvious; this basically forced the hands of each of the producers to pump harder. Without new discoveries, and continuous hammering on the extractive technologies, they will certainly see a steep decline before they put the expensively maintained rigs into mothballs as the North Sea oilers cut and and run and forever minimize their losses.

I got motivated to run this simulation from a thread on the PeakOil.com message board.

Update: Apparently, those in the oil industry call this falloff by the phrase pump and dump because of the high cost of extraction [link].