Does this break Russia's production out of the former Soviet Union? I've often wondered on this point.

Post 1991 its Russia's production, before it's FSU. To my knowledge, there is no production data publicly available about Russia's production before 1992.

Thank you Khebab.

I should think that would deserve a prominent footnote, as that changes the interpretation of the chart enormously.

Even better would be to stick with FSU instead of conflating what are two quite different data sets.

My experience at TOD over the last 2 years has taught me that unfortunately Khebab will publish very misleading graphs if he thinks he can make a point with them.

A few weeks back somebody with a decent stats background completely lost his cool here on account of one of Khebab's masterpieces. Not that it did any good.

Khebab, do you have any formal training in statistical methods?

If so, one of these days the God of Regressions or perhaps the Devil is going to singe your behind! ;-)

My experience has been that Khebab is an objective scientist, interested in mathematically modeling complex production situations, who has enormously contributed to the Peak Oil debate.

On the other hand, my impression is that you have nothing to offer other than useless spurious criticisms.

Asebius, perhaps you should state your statistical background, so that we can determine your level of veracity.

Strong statements! I do have a PhD in Signal Processing so I think I know a few things about statistics!

A few weeks back somebody with a decent stats background completely lost his cool here on account of one of Khebab's masterpieces. Not that it did any good.

I don't recall that, do you have a link?

Beside, I don't see how bad data sources have nothing to do with performing misleading statistical analysis. In any case it won't change the outcome for Russia.

Don't forget also that most contributors are doing this work on their free time and have a demanding day work so mistakes are possible (I often find mistakes in peer-reviewed articles almost on a daily basis).

I have prepared a comprehensive list of papers and articles that Asebius has contributed to the Peak Oil debate. Here is that list:

I don't recall that, do you have a link?

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3835#comment-329504

Your reply had me laughing...

The goal of the "confidence interval" was to illustrate the large uncertainty existing among forecasts. I used only forecasts that are seeing a peak in the near future...

LOL!!!

Oh those lovely confidence intervals. Oh how they inspire confidence!!

Phd or not. I flatly do not believe that you have formal training in statistical methods.

I predict you will soon have a new screen name.

Look, I've been on this website long enough to know that answering to this kind of negative comments is a complete waste of my time.

I stand by what I said and my confidence intervals do represent where 95% of listed peak oil forecasts are seeing future crude oil + NGL supply, nothing more.

I also strongly suggest that you open a blog yourself (it's free: http://www.blogger.com/) and share with us your vast knowledge of Statistics. You can already count me as a frequent commentator :).

Khebab...if this is Hothgar, I may have to pull out my lamprey graphic again.

or present him with the "blowfly award" (only good for eating shit and bothering people ;-)

Asebius? Nice moniker. Why don't we just shorten the phonetics a little and call a spade a spade or let an ass be an ass, as the case may be.

You provide zero objective information on your own while you flame professional contributors.

The task of timing the peak, exactly, may well be beyond anyone. If Deffreyes missed it by a few hundred thousand barrels per day, then he missed it. But it doesn't really change the fact that peak oil is still coming out in the wash and that Khebab, Deffreyes, and others, have been far more accurate in predicting world oil production than known energy optimists -- CERA et all.

The price of oil alone is an indicator how dear and scarce supplies have become -- even in an age of undulating plateau.

The problem, in general, is not enough people are aware of the kind of analysis going on here and far too many people are happy to gobble up the kind of obsfucation you blow out. But like any other cloud of smoke, it will all too soon dissipate.

The casualty, for your kind of disinformation, are those poor souls who were disoriented by it and failed to prepare or respond adequately.

Assbeass, like other worm-tongues before you, are henceforth banished...

Asebius,
I dispatched that particular commenter quite easily. He essentially didn't know what he was talking about. Khebab's model results are perfectly valid. A model itself is a best guess estimate, much different than purely statistics-driven bootstraps.

This is what I said at the time, and if you don't like it, try to argue it now, I noticed you did not back then:

The no-name Name does not understand that some sort of model underlies all of these curves. For the "election polling" analogy Name brings up, no human behavioral model exists and yes indeed the projections are bootstrapped from a smaller subset and one can only use pure statistics to project error margins.

I find confidence intervals like Khebab presented perfectly valid. The "truth" about a situation may indeed converge with more and more physical behavioral models applied from sources of various breadths of knowledge.

Oh man Asebius, do you have nothing positive to contribute to these discussions? I find all of your comments unnecessary and counter productive, mostly I doubt you have any idea what you're actually talking about.

The people here at TOD do a great job of putting together complex info for the public's awareness on their own time, just because they feel people ought to know the trouble they got themselves into. What you're doing doesn't help the purpose of this intellectual forum, perhaps there is a forum where they welcome people who have nothing to contribute to an actual discussion, but I don't know where you would look.

I don't contribute much because I prefer to read more knowledgeble people's opinions. I do not count you as one of them.

Thanks for all the great analysis Khebab et Al

Asebius - wtf are you driving at here? Khebab is one of my most trusted sources. Sure we are all liable to make mistakes from time to time - but I'm not aware of many mistakes that Khebab has made. I'm not sure if you are being serious here or not. But one thing you have to realise is that running up charts and responding to comments like this takes time.

Splitting out Russian from FSU production is something we'd love to do - perhaps you could donate the data?

The relative heights of FSU and Russian production are actually quite irrelevant. What is highly relevant is that the territory currently known as Russia is struggling to increase production, or, has chosen to not increase production, perhaps rationalising that producing 5% less for twice the price makes good sense.

So what is your opinion on Russian oil production?

I don't think it has a lot of impact as far as C+C is concerned, I don't see any major differences with this ASPO chart:

Their peak is ~250 kbpd lower than mine.

Here is an overlay of my chart and Rembrandt's chart (Figure 68):

Rembrandt is using BP data (C+C+NGL) for 1985-2006 and ASPO data (C+C?) prior to 1985. We can see that using FSU data (EIA) prior to 1992 is higher by maybe 5% but it's a relatively reasonable approximation.

Here is my overlay considering FSU:

I have a non-shocked fit in green and a shocked fit in red.
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2005/11/fsu-oil-shock-model.html

Notice that Khebab's data drops a bit lower than the data I used after 1990, but then it caught back up by 2000.

The shock perturbations:

This is not assuming any new discoveries, only discoveries up to when I generated the chart in 2005.

L. F. Buz (aka Buzz) Ivanhoe included the former USSR in a 1998 newsletter. Buz told me that he had some editing help from Dr. Walter Youngquist which included a discussion of the term to use for "Russia"

http://hubbert.mines.edu/news/Ivanhoe_98-3.pdf