Houston Investment Banker Challenges "Myth" of Everlasting Saudi Oil

EVWorld.Com interviews investment banker Matthew Simmons on his new book about the perilous condition of Saudi Arabia's giant oil fields.

(PRWEB) August 8, 2005 -- "We have an energy data system created today that is simply rubbish", Houston-based energy industry investment banker Matthew Simmons tells EV World in an exclusive, two-part interview starting the week of August 7,2005 on the EVWorld.Com web site.

Simmons, who is the founder and chairman of Simmons and Company International, is the author of "Twilight in the Desert", an insider look at the health of Saudi Arabia's five major oil fields. The desert kingdom is the world's largest oil exporter, producing upwards of 9 million barrels of oil a day, most of it from five super-giant and giant fields that are now more than fifty years old.

The fate of the world's economy rests on the condition of those five fields, of which the world has known little since the early 1980s when Saudi Arabia's oil industry was nationalized. It is this paucity of accurate information that concerns Simmons the most and caused him to spend the better part of two years reading some 200 petroleum engineering papers devoted to Saudi oil field problems; performing what could be considered the first outsider "autopsy" of these vast fields. And what he learned has convinced him that the Saudis are coming perilously close to over-producing their fields, forcing them into premature decline at a time when the world is counting on them to produce upwards of 25 to 30 million barrels a day by 2025.

"What Mr. Simmons writes in 'Twilight in the Desert' and discusses during our nearly hour-long interview from his summer home in Maine should be front page news and at the top of Congress' agenda," said J. William Moore, EV World's Publisher and Editor in Chief, who conducted the interview. "If these fields collapse in the next three to five years, as Matt Simmons fears, it will have an unprecedented impact on the world, a world that glibly has expected Middle East oil to flow ceaselessly, forever".

Because few outside of Saudi Aramco and the Oil Ministry know the exact condition of Saudi Arabia's oil fields, including how many wells have been drilled, how much oil has been extracted and what is the percentage of water cut (the ratio of injected water to oil), there is no way at present to know how soon the world needs to prepare with this global-changing event.

"We at EV World are so concerned about this problem that we shortly will be launching a new initiative to acquaint American investors with the dramatic changes just ahead in the energy and transportation arenas and what it means to their investment strategies," Moore said. "We'll be announcing more details later."

EV World (http://www.evworld.com) is an online weekly publication devoted to examining both energy and transportation technology and issues, reaching upwards of 50,000 readers weekly.

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