Houston author to discuss looming oil shock

Houston resident Matthew Simmons will, in essence, bring his book tour, “Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy” to Midland Wednesday, May 3.

His lecture will be at Midland College’s Chaparral Center beginning at 7:30 p.m. There is no charge for the event, which is open to the public.

…The world, he said, is “now at the same stage as we were in the 1970s when domestic supplies peaked. By December 1970, when we thought of domestic production as the lower 48 states and shallow Gulf of Mexico, it peaked at 10.2 to 10.5 million barrels a day. Twelve years later, after prices had risen 40-fold and we had gone from drilling 10,000 wells a year to 45,000 wells a year, we had fallen to 6.9 million barrels a day excluding production from Alaska.”

The picture for natural gas production, he said, is even bleaker.

The situation can’t wait for politicians to act, he said.

“We are totally out of spare capacity and have no tolerance for supply interruptions,” he said, adding that unrest in Nigeria has taken hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil off the markets, Venezuela is becoming less and less friendly to the United States, Mexico’s oil production is peaking, Iraq is unstable and Iran, which is desperate for nuclear energy to provide electricity to its people, is threatening to cut off production if it is subjected to sanctions or even military action to end its nuclear program.

MyWestTexas