https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200511112624.htm

Despite everything, the Hotelling rule still retains its central status in the economics of mineral and energy resources: it is on this basis that more sophisticated 'extensions' are constructed to account for market realities. Roberto Ferreira da Cunha, from the Berkeley Research Group (Brazil), and Antoine Missemer, a CNRS researcher attached to CIRED, the International Centre for Research on Environment and Development (CNRS/CIRAD/AgroParisTech/Ecole des Ponts ParisTech/EHESS), undertook a detailed and unprecedented examination of Harold Hotelling's archives**. By analysing the origins of the model, they conclude that its scope of validity is more limited t han commonly established, and decisively clarify the reasons for its empirical weaknesses.

Hotelling's drafts, as well as his correspondence, with oil engineers for example, point to a reinterpretation of the 1931 article. It turns out that the 'rule', which he had devised as early as 1924 for abstract assets, was in no way intended to be applied to the concrete case of mineral and energy resources. From 1925 to 1930, Hotelling himself identified unavoidable geological constraints that changed his initial result: increased production costs as extraction progresses, or the cost resulting from ramped up production. As he outlined, this transformed his model, which was then potentially able to describe bell-shaped production paths, such as those used in debates about peak oil.