Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
7
WILD CARDS
“Is the world running out of oil?”
h e question is chilling: if the answer turns out to be yes, the global
economy will be turned upside down, and everything that people think
they know about energy will be brought into doubt. Speculation about
the prospect skyrocketed at er the release of a bombshell book, Tw ilight
in the Desert: h e Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy . 1
Published by an energy banker named Mat hew Simmons in 2005, the
book became a surprise best-seller, waking many Americans up to what
Simmons warned was an impending shortage of oil. Simmons pored
over scores of technical papers prepared for the Society of Petroleum
Engineers, and he concluded that Riyadh was grossly overstating the
amount of oil it has let in the ground. Terms like “fuzzy logic” set of
alarm bells in Simmons's mind. Oil i elds, he discovered, were being
beset by falling pressures, making their crude more dii cult to produce,
and ef ectively slashing their reserves. It was also safe to assume that
others were inl ating their numbers too. h e combination of rising oil
prices and stagnant production, so evident by 2007, seemed to vindi-
cate the arguments from Simmons and his allies. Oil supplies appeared
 
 
 
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