All Pumped Out

These are nail-biting times for the oil markets. With demand testing the limits of supply, each bit of threatening news — whether a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico or labor strife in Nigeria — stokes prices that already are at record levels. Now along comes a book, Twilight in the Desert, that aims to smash one of the energy watchers’ bedrock assumptions: that in the Middle East, and in Saudi Arabia in particular, oil is “easy to find, cheap to produce, and almost inexhaustible in its supply.”

Far from being a reliable source of more and more oil in decades to come, Saudi Arabia’s magnificent fields are nearing senescence, argues Matthew R. Simmons, a Houston investment banker and longtime energy Cassandra. “The risk is high,” he says, “that twilight may soon descend on oil production in Saudi Arabia.”
Business Week