Blog



Sokath 0.3.0 Beta

This is the third release of Sokath. Sokath is basically a side project I'm working on. My main project is a mobile phone project that I'm doing for my degree in Computer Science, but enough about that.

The first release of this project was a small prototype that could calculate a single Hubbert Curve for the oil production of the entire world. The second release had as added functionality the ability to calculate Hubbert Curves for different regions (e.g. North-America, Middle East, etc..). This is the third release, which has the following added functionality:

The overall view is needed, because there will be all kinds of predictions that can be selected as a base for the calculations. It would otherwise not be possible to have a good view of all predictions made by different companies and organizations. This view only contains just a few curves, but it will be extended in the near future. It is also possible to check out the demand.

The Koppelaar view contains three curves made by Rembrandt Koppelaar, who has made a bottom-up analyse in 2005. His report can be found here.
These curves can be used as a base for the calculations of the future oil prices.

The last three points can be explained all together. It is very easy to show the demand and supply curves on the screen, but the curves themselves are not that important. What is more important is the difference between the demand and supply versus the price. The difference is the most interesting part, because you can actually derive the future prices from that if you use a formula and some data taken from predictions. At first, I wanted to implement Non-Linear Least Squares to create the formulas, but when I saw the differences between supply and demand I noticed that it wasn't very easy to do due to the fact that the datapoints are so spread wide apart. So I just made some formulas myself based on observations.

I think that the formulas are working rather well. They don't seem to work well for the oilcrises in the 1970s, but that can be covered by saying that it all was a bubble due to the fact the traders were all carried away by the events in the Middle East at the time. The emotional state of traders is something that the software can't predict (maybe later ;) ).

Anyway, I'm going to finish my mobile project now. You can expect a new release later.