by Matthew R. Simmons
Chairman and CEO
Simmons & Company International

It is a pleasure to launch the publication of my book, Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy. My hope is that it will serve as a wake-up call to the urgency and importance of understanding the limits, not just to Saudi Arabia’s oil, but to the entire world’s oil supply, because we are clearly approaching the peaking of global oil supply at the same time as the world faces a relentless increase in oil demand.

Twilight in the Desert spells out the risks of a pending Saudi Arabian oil shock and its potential impact on the world economy. The evidence supporting this warning is laid out in 400 pages of detailed evidence. The bibliography lists more than 250 sources of information, including 235 technical papers from the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ remarkable digital library. The authors of virtually every paper were scientists, managers and engineers employed by the Saudi national oil company, including senior technicians working in the actual oilfields that produce virtually all of Saudi Arabia’s oil.

The outcome that the book warns of is not a certainty. But it is the conclusion I came to following two years of in-depth research into Saudi Arabia’s oil system, which in turn was grounded in the three decades I have spent studying and analyzing the oil and gas industry.

Purchase the PDF file to continue reading this article in its entirety