future oil prices
Aug. 10th, 2005 04:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelidonThe link below leads to a long, but interesting (to me, anyway) interview, if scary. I sure hope Simmons is very wrong. 5-10 times increase in oil prices? And he's not talking 20 years from now, he's talking about worst-case, starting as soon as this winter. I can't even conceive what that would do to the world. Even a doubling from current levels would be an economic disaster. Oil and gas prices are again at record heights this week (Crude touches another record, breaks $65), in part because of a series of accidents and issues with U.S. refineries, highlighting the fact that the refining and transportation infrastructure is pretty much running 24/7, tapped out at 100%+. Things are so tight that any significant constraint in either supply, refining or transportation will tend to cause prices to skyrocket. Anyone who's a student of economics, systems science, or Murphy knows that if you have no leeway, no room for error or happenstance, a crisis point is a matter of when, not if. Everything breaks, everything fails, and often at the worst possible time. CNN had an article today about near-misses in running out of aviation fuel, due to some of the same infrastructure issues.
We have got to get a government fully behind conservation and alternative energy, and pushing for local work towards lowering our individual and community energy footprints is absolutely essential.
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TRANSCRIPTION OF INTERVIEW
August 6, 2005
Matthew R. Simmons, President
Simmons & Company International
author: Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy
full article: http://www.financialsense.com/transcriptions/Simmons.html
JIM PUPLAVA: Joining me on the program is Matthew Simmons. He’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Simmons & Company International, a Houston-based investment bank that specializes in the energy industry. Mr. Simmons serves on the boards of Brown-Forman Corporation, The Atlantic Council of The United States, he’s also a member of the National Petroleum Council and The Council of Foreign Relations. He has an MBA from Harvard University. And he’s here to discuss his new book Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy.
Matt, I want to start out the discussion from the back of your book in Appendix B. Several years ago you did a study of the world’s major oil fields. What did you find?
MATTHEW SIMMONS: It was really an incredible exercise of trying to collect the data no one had ever actually thought of doing before, and that’s, what are the top oil fields in the world – field by field. And the background for me doing this is that I’ve participated 2 years in a row in an energy supply workshop, conducted by the energy analysts of the CIA in Washington, where they got about 10 of the best oil experts together, and we’d spend a day doing a discussion of all the key countries, and how much oil capacity they had in place over the course of the coming 3 years. I sat there listening aghast at all of these experts with their laptops that kept looking at their supply models, and it’s how China will be producing 3,217,000 barrels/day this year, and 3,281,000 barrels/day. And I basically said: “how do you all even know that. What are the 3 or 4 top fields in China?” And no one had any answers.
So I decided it would be interesting and educational to see if you could actually put together a list of the top 20 oil fields by name. And I thought somebody must have done this before, and the more I dug the more I realized that no one ever had.
[snip]
full article: http://www.financialsense.com/transcriptions/Simmons.html
We have got to get a government fully behind conservation and alternative energy, and pushing for local work towards lowering our individual and community energy footprints is absolutely essential.
-------
TRANSCRIPTION OF INTERVIEW
August 6, 2005
Matthew R. Simmons, President
Simmons & Company International
author: Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy
full article: http://www.financialsense.com/transcriptions/Simmons.html
JIM PUPLAVA: Joining me on the program is Matthew Simmons. He’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Simmons & Company International, a Houston-based investment bank that specializes in the energy industry. Mr. Simmons serves on the boards of Brown-Forman Corporation, The Atlantic Council of The United States, he’s also a member of the National Petroleum Council and The Council of Foreign Relations. He has an MBA from Harvard University. And he’s here to discuss his new book Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy.
Matt, I want to start out the discussion from the back of your book in Appendix B. Several years ago you did a study of the world’s major oil fields. What did you find?
MATTHEW SIMMONS: It was really an incredible exercise of trying to collect the data no one had ever actually thought of doing before, and that’s, what are the top oil fields in the world – field by field. And the background for me doing this is that I’ve participated 2 years in a row in an energy supply workshop, conducted by the energy analysts of the CIA in Washington, where they got about 10 of the best oil experts together, and we’d spend a day doing a discussion of all the key countries, and how much oil capacity they had in place over the course of the coming 3 years. I sat there listening aghast at all of these experts with their laptops that kept looking at their supply models, and it’s how China will be producing 3,217,000 barrels/day this year, and 3,281,000 barrels/day. And I basically said: “how do you all even know that. What are the 3 or 4 top fields in China?” And no one had any answers.
So I decided it would be interesting and educational to see if you could actually put together a list of the top 20 oil fields by name. And I thought somebody must have done this before, and the more I dug the more I realized that no one ever had.
[snip]
full article: http://www.financialsense.com/transcriptions/Simmons.html
