Twilight in the Desert

Back after an extended Christmas "blog break" during which time I read "Twilight in the Desert" by Matthew Simmons. Simmons is an M&A advisor specialising in the Oil and Gas Industry whom also writes and speaks as a very high profile "peak oiler". His book is very well written and impressed me by deep and thorough research based on a review of over 200 technical papers by engineers and scientists involved in the key Saudi oil fields and presented to the Society of Petroleum Engineers.
In short this shows that production from these very large fields is no longer "easy" and Saudi Aramco are having to use state of the art technologies to keep production up. Given the technical difficulties faced it is simply impossible to be confident about being able to sustain high levels of production from these fields for decades to come and this leads to grave doubts about the level of the reserves Saudi Arabia claims still exist. Much of the argument can be followed by looking at Ghawar, the greatest oil-bearing structure ever known and which first began production in 1951. Ghawar has now produced over 55bn barrels of oil and still supplies around 5m bpd which equates to around 55% of Saudi output and 6% of global supply. It is believed that water comprises about 33% of the liquids produced, which increases complexity and expense and clearly shows that this is a mature field. Someday soon production at Ghawar will peak, if it hasn't already. When Ghawar peaks so does Saudi Arabia and so does the world.