Seven Questions: The Future of Oil

Foreign Policy: What makes you think some fields are in for a production collapse?

Matthew Simmons: The faster you extract oil from a reservoir, the faster you dissipate the reservoir pressure. Once you get below a certain level of pressure, you have to get oil out using an artificial lift or water injection, and some oil will be trapped in the reservoir.

Overproduction leads to production collapse. The Brent field in the North Sea for instance, came on line in 1976 and peaked at 500,000 bpd in the early 1980s. I think that field now produces around 30,000 bpd. Take the Yibal field in Oman. Shell was so convinced that modern technology was a production miracle that it increased the production facilities at Yibal by 30 percent. And just as that happened, the field peaked at 225,000 bpd in 1997, and by 2003, it was down to about 80,000 bpd. When I talk about production collapse, I
Foreign Policy