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An experiment to evaluate methods for estimating fossil fuel resources |
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| Authors: | John D. Sterman George P. Richardson |
| Affiliation: | 1. Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, U.S.A. John D. Sterman is Assistant Professor at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He helped develop the long-term forecasting models used by the U.S. Department of Energy and has published widely in the areas of energy and economic dynamics. His current research centers on the System Dynamics National Model and models of the economic long wave or Kondratieff cycle.;2. Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts 02766, U.S.A. George P. Richardson is Associate Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Wheaton College, Norton, MA. He is the co-author of Introduction to System Dynamics Modelling with DYNAMO (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981), and publications vice-president for the System Dynamics Review, the journal of the System Dynamics Society. |
| Abstract: | Estimates of petroleum and natural gas resources vary substantially, both over time and across estimation methods. This paper develops a simulation model of global oil resources to evaluate different resource estimation techniques. Protocols for the Hubbert life cycle and USGS geological analogy methods are developed and applied to synthetic data generated by the model. It is shown that the Hubbert method can generate an accurate estimate as early as twenty years before the peak of global production, but the geological analogy approach overestimates the true resource base over the life cycle of the resource. The results show the applicability of simulation and the synthetic data approach to the problem of evaluating forecasting methods. |
| Keywords: | System dynamics Simulation Petroleum Natural resources Estimation |