The Modeling of World Oil Production Using Sigmoidal Functions—Update 2010

Abstract

The depletion of the world oil resource based upon the logistic function has been updated and fitted to the recent history of oil production. The analysis uses data through the year 2009 and further introduces the asymmetric Gompertz function in order to account for additional oil resources. Results of these calculations depict a range of production rates under different resource limits. The characteristic curvature coefficients and the peak years of production are fitted to United States Geological Survey estimates of ultimately recoverable resource (URR) limits between 2.5 and 4.5 terabarrels (TB). The logistic fittings yield peak productions from 30.4 to 38.6 gigabarrels per year (GB/yr) for URRs from 2.5 to 3.0 TB in years 2008 through 2016. The lower probability of occurrence URRs (from 4.0 to 4.5 TB) inclusive of forms of oils yet to be introduced yield peak productions from 30.9 to 33.5 GB/yr during the years 2018 through 2023. The Gompertz function is used as the model for the lower probability URR production.

Keywords:

• Gompertz analysis
• logistic analysis
• peak oil production