Running on Fumes

How bad is the current energy crisis? Really, really bad, says oil expert Charley Maxwell.

After half a century in the oil business, Charles Maxwell is widely referred to as the dean of energy analysts. As a Marshall Scholar at Oxford he specialized in Arabic and Persian language and history before joining Mobil in 1957. He spent a decade with the oil giant, scheduling tanker shipments, working in a field office in Nigeria, and negotiating Middle East production agreements. When the Arab oil embargo hit in 1973, he was already being hailed by Institutional Investor as Wall Street’s number-one oil analyst. Today he is a senior energy analyst with Weeden & Co., which provides proprietary research to institutional investors.

Charley Maxwell is not your classic environmentalist — he favors further development of coal and nuclear energy and sits on the board of a coal-bed methane company in Denver. But in this late-September conversation with Sonia Shah, author of Crude: The Story of Oil, Maxwell urges a new conservation ethic that may — or may not — save us from the worst energy crisis we have yet faced.

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