The peaking of oil revisited
■"The Breaking Point," by Peter Maas, New York Times Magazine, 21 August 2005, p. 30.
This seems like a weak article by a sharp writer. The evidence for the peaking is a lot of suspicions expressed by smart oil industry people that Saudi Arabia is blowing smoke out its rear when it says it can plus up its oil production in coming years. What the Saudis promise is lots more investment and better technology. And outside experts (there are no inside experts on Saudi Arabia excepts Saudis) just don't see this happening successfully in Saudi Arabia in the coming years.
What is this suspicion based on? Well, the big smoking gun here is a western oil expert who studies dozens of studies on Saudi oil fields and comes to the conclusion that everything there is a whole lot less solid than it seems.
Here's my problem with this analysis: Maas admits that the studies cover only a portion of the known Saudi fields and "date back, in some cases, several decades"! Despite these huge faults, these studies are presented "as perhaps the best public data about the condition and prospects of Saudi reservoirs."
Oh, and did I mention that the great expert, Matthew Simmons, is a banker and not a geologist?
This is the guts of a major NYT mag cover story?
How about a real expert?
Most experts do not share Simmons' concerns about the imminence of peak oil. One of the industry's most prominent consultants, Daniel Yergin, author of a Pulitizer Prize-winning book about petroleum, dismisses the doomsday visions. "This is not the first time that the world has 'run out of oil,'" he wrote in a recent Washington Post opinion essay. "It's more like the fifth. Cycles of shortage and surplus characterize the entire history of the oil industry." Yergin says that a number of oil projects that are under construction will increase the supply by 20 percent in five years and that technological advances will increase the amount of oil that can be recovered from existing reservoirs. (Typically, with today's technology, only about 40 percent of a reservoir's oil can be pumped to the surface).
40 percent.
Interesting how the great expert gets a whole paragraph but the banker who's read a lot of geology studies decades old drive the logic of the piece.
And that's a cover story for the NYT mag?