PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

3. INANIMATE PRODUCTION LIKE ANIMATE REPRODUCTION
OIL DISCOVERY AND PRODUCTION GO HAND IN HAND
Millions of
barrels
200,000
CUMULATIVE PROVED
DISCOVERIES
150,000
CUMULATIVE
PRODUCTION
100,000
50,000
0
1890 1940 1990 2040
FIGURE 3.2 Data (thick lines) and S-curve fits (thin lines) for oil discovery and
production in the United States. The little circles indicate data points during the
last fifteen years, which did not contribute to the determination of the fitted S-
curves.
mechanism based on a closed feedback loop. ∗ In feedback loops causality
works both ways. Finding more oil may result in increased
production, or alternatively, increases in production may provoke intensification
of efforts to find more oil. In any case, the strict regulation
says that we discover oil reserves ten years before we consume them,
not earlier or later. Naturally, the effort going into searching for oil may
increase as we exhaust easily available supplies; one alternative would
be to search more deeply. Finally, production may slow down as a consequence
of stiffening conditions for finding new reserves. Whatever
happens, the regulation observed in Figure 3.2 guarantees ten years of
reserves at any given time.
∗ A feedback loop is a cyclical process in which corrective action is taken in response to
information about an earlier state. A typical feedback loop is a heating system controlled
by a thermostat.
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