Peak oil, tech boom share some parallels

The most surprising tidbit in Matthew Simmons’ peak oil book, Twilight in the Desert, is about a dubious oil consultancy based in Austria.

If memory serves, the firm earned its keep counting oil tankers leaving major ports.

The data were keenly awaited by the marketplace and could move the price of crude sharply and quickly. Investors, users and producers paid handsomely for the information.

What the book revealed was that this towering fountain of information was housed in a small, dumpy office above a corner store in land-locked Vienna and the data weren’t, in retrospect, particularly reliable. For all we know, it might have cobbled together its theories by dumpster diving behind the nearby headquarters of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Oil is the lifeblood of the world’s economy and yet the oil markets are clouded in dubious information. Take Mr. Simmons’ thesis, that Saudi Arabian production was on the verge of declining. The kingdom angrily denied this. The fact that there could even be an argument was only possible because of the secrecy with which it and other OPEC producers guard their data.

Globe and Mail