I've known of this book for over a year now. I resisted for a long time buying it, thinking that I'd read enough about oil, its history, and predictions of peak oil, to trouble myself with 400 pages of speculation about a single country's future oil production.

I don't remember anymore what finally made me put the book in my Amazon shopping cart. It was probably the fact that mentions of the book didn't die down soon after it was published, but instead kept becoming more and more common, and I was at a disadvantage since I didn't have firsthand knowledge about the book's contents.

I've now read the book and can say I was entirely wrong when I thought I already knew what it was going to say. I shared the condition very common in people, according to Simmons, of having the following assumptions about Saudi Arabia: oil was produced from a multitude of fields, new fields were being constantly found, fields were being kept in reserve, oil was cheap and easy to produce, and finally, that Saudi Arabia was one of those rich Arab countries with wealthy playboys as the primary citizens.

Simmons proves every one of those assumptions wrong. The vast majority of oil is actually produced from very few giant oilfields that have been producing for 40-50 years, they haven't found any new giant fields in the last 30 years, nor do they have such fields in reserve. The production methods they use to squeeze oil out of these old, old fields would make no sense unless the fields were nearing their end.

In the last 30 years Saudi Arabia has transformed from an obscenely wealthy nation with just a few million people to a country with 6 times the population and one-third the GDP per capita. Their electricity and water desalination infrastructure is straining under the enormous growth, and what's worse, the natural gas that they planned to power them has not been found in the quantities they assumed it would.

I have little doubt we're either at or very near the global oil producing peak. The forecasters who blithely draw graphs how the world's oil consumption will grow to 130 million barrels would be laughable if not for the fact that most nations seem to be basing their behavior on the assumption that those forecasts are actually correct, without giving any thought to where those 50 million additional barrels per day are going to come from.

It's actually a lot more than 50 million barrels, since pretty much every non-OPEC country has publicly admitted that their oil output has peaked, so you also have to factor in the extra barrels needed to replace lost production from the current numbers, as oil production fades.

The forecasters, when confronted with this, usually just shrug or say something to the effect that the Middle East can double or even triple their production if needed, and keep that up for 50+ years.

Simmons gives an enlightening treatment on the magical oil reserve inflation wave that swept through Middle East 15-20 years ago and resulted in huge reserves, that even more magically have stayed exactly the same since then despite the countries producing gigantic amounts of oil during that period.

It is these numbers, backed with absolutely no facts, and probably pulled out of thin air, that leads to forecasts with Middle East as the dominant producer in the future.

As much as I hate seeing the price of my scuba diving vacations go up, it may be worth it just to get the Middle East nations returned to their proper relevance level in international politics, which will happen when their oil output drops enough.

I read some critiques of this book to see if Simmons was provably wrong about something, but the critiques only increased my trust in his results. For example, one party said "The 1979 Senate hearings predicted Ghawar's output would drop in the early nineties; this didn't happen, so Simmons is wrong!", completely ignoring the fact that Ghawar was mostly resting through the entire 1980s as Saudi Arabia throttled their output.

I'll end with the scariest thing from the book: Ghawar actually peaked in 1981, 25 years ago. Only the rest during the 1980s and the development of the southern parts of the field in the 1990s have allowed its output to still remain as high as it is today.