Matthew Simmons

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Matthew R. Simmons

Occupation Investment banker, Author
Children 5 daughters

Matthew R. Simmons, chairman and CEO of Simmons & Company International, is a prominent oil-industry insider and one of the world's leading experts on the topic of peak oil. Simmons was motivated by the 1973 energy crisis to create an investment banking firm catering to oil companies. In his previous capacity, he served as energy adviser to U.S. President George W. Bush.

Matthew Simmons believes the Club of Rome predictions were correct. Simmons is an advisor to the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre. He is a member of the National Petroleum Council and the Council on Foreign Relations. He believes a careful assessment of Saudi Arabian oil reserves is the most significant issue shaping petroleum politics.

Simmons is the author of the book Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy. His examination of oil reserve decline rates helped raise awareness of the unreliability of Middle East oil reserves as the published reports have never been verified.

Contents

[edit] Saudi Arabian oil reserves

In his book, Simmons argues that production from Saudi Arabia, and especially from Ghawar, the world's largest oil field, will peak in the near future, if it has not done so already. Simmons bases his case on hundreds of internal documents from Saudi Aramco, professional journals, and other authoritative sources.

However, Saudi Aramco officials, such as Dr. Nansen G. Saleri, contend that Saudi Arabia is fully capable not only of keeping up current production, but of expanding it significantly, even though it had not done so by mid-2007 despite near-record oil prices. However, raising production levels would have brought prices down. Others have claimed that Simmons lacks the type of training that would allow him to read oil industry technical reports. Saudi Arabia and some other oil exporting nations consider reserve analysis to be a national secret.[citation needed]

In short, opinions vary as to the correctness of the interpretations of data and engineering concepts he used to extrapolate his estimates of remaining oil reserves, with many independent experts, such as Colin Campbell, Kenneth Deffeyes, and even some oil companies [1] agreeing with Simmons, while many in the USGS and the Saudi government dispute his views.[citation needed]

"Twilight in the Desert" has been criticized for "turning benign technical matters into crisis-level evidence" and making "numerous technical gaffes", such as misinterpreting fuzzy logic as meaning "fuzzy numbers", citing obsolete data on water cuts, and assuming that a pressure drop in a vertical wells has the same implications as in a multilateral well. He is also accused of ghost references and misrepresenting sources.[2]

[edit] Oil price wager

In August 2005, Simmons bet John Tierney and Rita Simon, the widow of Julian Simon, $2500 each that the price of oil averaged over the entire calendar year of 2010 will be at least $200 per barrel (in 2005 dollars). [1]

[edit] Family

Simmons has a wife and five daughters. The eldest graduated from Vanderbilt University '01. The second graduated from Connecticut College '04. The third graduated from Colorado College '06. The fourth graduated from Texas Christian University '07. The youngest attends Duke University and will graduate '09.

[edit] Appearances

Simmons has made contributions to the films The End of Suburbia, Crude Impact, and Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash.

[edit] Further reading

  • Matthew Simmons, Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy 2005 ISBN 0-471-73876-X

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Tierney, John. link The $10,000 Question. NY Times. 23 August 2005. Retrieved 7 June 2007

[edit] External links

[edit] Articles

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