The Myth Of Saudi Oil - Part 1 Of Interview With Matthew Simmons

[hatrack]

"We've created a gigantic myth over the last thirty-five to forty years", Matthew Simmons told me from his summer home in Maine, "that effectively said the Middle East has unlimited amounts of oil when it wasn't true". How does he know this? Because he's spent the better part of the last two years carefully combing through a three feet-high stack of Society of Petroleum Engineer technical papers he discovered after attending an industry conference in Saudi Arabia.

"What I didn't realize at the time was I apparently was the first person of any sort of notoriety to ever even raised the issue , which now fascinates me. How did we start so glibly assuming that the Middle East has so much oil that they would, basically, never face a peak amount when, in fact, there was no data to support that other than some numbers that didn‘t have any validity behind them".

And therein lies the kernel of the problem. No one -- with the exception of the Saudis -- knows with any certainty how much oil has been extracted. I wanted to say "pumped", but the fields in Saudi Arabia don't use the traditional "donkey" pumps to extract their oil. Instead, they use reservoir pressure schemes to force the oil from underground petroleum traps locked in ancient strata. In fact, no public data has been released on the fields in Saudi Arabia since Saudi Aramco was nationalized around 1982. So, it's been 23 years since the last reliable production numbers were released.

"The proven reserves, which used to be reported on a detailed, field-by-field basis disappeared, rolled up into just country-by-country. Over the period of the first eight years of the 1980s, all of the Middle East oil producers tripled the amount of proven reserves they said they had. And then, effectively, country-by-country, the number stayed still. It never changed from 1987-88 to 2005; and nobody ever said, What's going on? How do you basically keep producing 15-20 million barrels a day out of the Middle East and the proven reserves never change?"

EDIT

http://www.evworld.com/view.cfm?section=article&storyid=884

[mhr]

1. Please Cross Post To The Peak Oil Group

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=266

[Inland]

2. What's worse than the Saudis having all the oil?

The Saudis having all the oil and there not being much left.

[funflower]

7. So that's why Shrubby was kissing Prince Abdullah or whoever it was on TV.

Gotta be good buddies w/ the major oil producers.

That or take over their country....

[bemildred]

3. Tsk. Seems like a lack of "transparency" here.

I wonder what that could be about?

[fedsron2us]

4. So much of what Simmons says seems plausible

I just wish this analysis was not coming from some one who had been a member of Cheney's 'Energy Task Force'. All the evidence points to Peak Oil being imminent yet I somehow have a nagging suspicion we are all be played as suckers. Maybe all those years of listening to official lies has just made me too paranoid to recognise when someone is actually telling the truth.

[hatrack]

6. Read his book - it's not political or (as far as I can tell) biased

Instead, it's a methodical, systematic ane even slightly dry look at what that nature of Saudi oil geology is, how the oil recovery systems there work, a field-by-field analysis of what they have and what they have left and what has been going on there since 1982.

It is truly compelling and I can't recommend it highly enough.

[Delphinus]

5. Here's one I posted the other day (under Peak Oil)

of Matthew Simmons with Financial Sense Online's Jim Pupluva:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=266&topic_id=1403&mesg_id=1403