A while ago I read the Heinberg's Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies.. In it, he describes Hubbert's method. From Deffeyes similar book Hubbert's Peak description:
M. King Hubbert was a Shell geologist who in 1956 predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s and then begin to decline.
The Hubbert method is based on the observation that oil production in any region follows a bell-shaped curve. Production increases rapidly at first, as the cheapest and most readily accessible oil is recovered. As the difficulty of extracting the oil increases, it becomes more expensive and less competitive with other fuels. Production slows, levels off and begins to fall.
Underground reserves provide a glimpse of the future: when the rate of new discoveries does not keep up with the growth of oil production, the amount of oil remaining underground begins to fall. That's a tip-off that a decline in production lies ahead.
Deffeyes used a slightly more sophisticated version of the Hubbert method to make the global calculations. The numbers pointed to 2003 as the year of peak production, but because estimates of global reserves are inexact, Deffeyes settled on a range from 2004 to 2008.
Let's be really really clear. The Hubbert method was used in 1956 to correctly predict that US production would peak in the early 1970s, and has been used by Deffeyes and Heinberg to predict that world oil production will be peaking in 2004-2008 timeframe. And obviously prices will be dramatically increasing.
Hmm.. Crude prices are hitting records, Opec can't produce any more. Seems like we might be starting to have demand outstrip supply.
And yet bozos like David Frum have to keep yapping and diverting us from solving our real problems. In today's National Post, he says "No the world is not 'running out of' oil. Actually, the world's proven reserves of oil are 10 times bigger today than they were 30 years ago".
He's just totally wrong. There was a spike in "reserves" in the early 70s, when the opec countries all increased their alleged reserves dramatically. They did this because opec decided production should be directly related to their reserves. So they all suddenly found about 5 times as much oil. But in actuality, the reserves that were known in the late 60s are effectively unchanged. The only significant change in reserves in 30 years has been marketing fibs.
Some reserves are becoming more feasible to extract as the price has gone up, such as the Alberta tar sands. Extraction techniques are getting somewhat better. But the reserve numbers haven't changed.
It's time for people to wake up and smell the coffee. The Oil is running out, it's going to get really expensive. This will have consequences and force us into some difficult choices. These choices are only going to get harder.
Reporters/Commentators like Frum need to stop spouting unjustified and incorrect nonsense. This diverts us from making the hard choices now.
There's a fascinating artice, 'Is 'Peak Oil' A Scam? Oil Fields Are Re-Filling Naturally And Rapidly', on the 'Current News You Need To Know' page at SurvivalistSkills.Com.
Makes for interesting reading!