Global Update of Dispersive Discovery + Oil Shock Model

Jean Laherrere of ASPO France last year presented a paper entitled "Uncertainty on data and forecasts". A TOD commenter grabbed the following figures from Pp.58 and 59:

I finally put two and two together and realized that the NGL portion of the data really had little to do with typical crude oil discoveries, which only occasionally coincides with natural gas findings. Khebab has duly noted this as he always references the Shock Oil model with the caption "Crude Oil + NGL". Taking the hint, I refit the shock model to better represent the lower peak of crude-only production data. This essentially scales back the peak by about 10% as shown in the second figure above.

So I restarted with the assumption that the discoveries comprised only crude oil, and any NGL would come from separate natural gas discoveries. This meant that that I could use the same discovery model on discovery data, but needed to reduce the overcompensation on extraction rate to remove the "phantom" NGL production that crept into the oil shock production profile. This essentially will defer the peak because of the decreased extractive force on the discovered reserves.

I fit the discovery plot by Laherrere to the dispersive discovery model with a cumulative limit of 2800 GB and a cubic-quadratic rate of 0.01. This gives the blue line in the following figure.

For the oil shock production model, I used {fallow,construction,maturation} rates of {0.167,0.125,0.1} to establish the stochastic latency between discovery and production. I tuned to match the shocks via the following extraction rate profile:

As a bottom-line, this estimate fits in between the original oil shock profile that I produced a couple of years ago and the more recent oil shock model that used a model of the perhaps more optimistic Shell discovery data from earlier this year. I now have confidence that the discovery data by Shell, which Khebab had crucially observed had the cryptic small print scale "boe" (i.e. barrels of oil equivalent), should probably wholly contribute the total Crude Oil + NGL production profile. Thus, we have the following set of models that I alternately take blame for (the original mismatched model) and now dare to take credit for (the latter two).

Original Model(peak=2003) < No NGL(peak=2008) < Shell data of BOE(peak=2010)

I still find it endlessly fascinating how the peak position of the models do not show the huge sensitivity to changes that one would expect with the large differences in the underlying URR. When it comes down to it, shifts of a few years don't mean much in the greater scheme of things. However, how we conserve and transition on the backside will make all the difference in the world.