The Oil Drum has written a story titled: Dr. Chu, Dr. Aleklett, and the Price of Oil, and at the end of the story they propose that Dr. Chu, Nobel Prize winner and Energy Secretary should go to Uppsala: “Maybe in the meantime he might sit in the odd seminar at Uppsala.”
It would have been a great honor to give a seminar for Dr. Chu, but I think that it will be hard for him to find the time and come to Uppsala. But, I can offer him a seminar that I gave in Aberdeen in March 2009. The title is: “Global Energy Resources – The Peak Oil View” and can be found on this address:
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/cops/events/energycontroversies/peak-oil.php#
October 23, 2009 at 7:56 pm |
Professor Aleklett,
Thank you for posting at TOD and thanks for your excellent PO presentation at Aberdeen.
I do have an objection to your characterizing the Hubert/logistic curve as ’statistical(twice!). It is the differential of the solution of a straight forward differential equation.
Gauss’s curve is derived from coin flipping, etc. along with series approximations and has a completely different origin in my opinion.
This might seem like nit-picking (as you quickly indicated that Hubbert’s curve was not a realistic representation of oil depletion) but at TOD there are some who persist in explaining oil depletion as probabilitistic. This obscures all our responsibility for mitigating Peak Oil, in my view.
Just as with the IPCC projections it is not the science which is probabilistic but the human response which results in variation.
Another gripe I have is your equivocal stand on unconventional oil while communicating forcefully on our need for oil. This is very confusing. It is one thing to go from 30 Gb to 0 Gb and another to go from
30 Gb to 15 Gb. There is 600 Gb of recoverable bitumen and 430 Gb of recoverable heavy oil according to the USGS geologists. The EROI of recovering these while considerable is not prohibitive in my opinion.
It is true that few are willing to make the investment today but consider that few are willing to invest even in conventional oil. In South Africa, under stress the government was willing to invest in CTL. I feel you are assuming a low EROI from the attitude of the oil companies(who don’t want to become mining companies).
At any rate, I hope you come back to TOD and engage with us.