Matthew R. Simmons is one of the smartest oil men on earth. He knows more about Saudi Aramco Oil Company than I do and I lived in Saudi Arabia for 18 years. I love the title, Twilight in the Desert, it's sometimes twilight that's the most beautiful in Sauid Arabia. In the empty quarter, away from all city lights you can see a billion stars. I am a romantic when I remember the most beautiful sight in the world, nightime flare off from the Riyadh Refinery! It's beautiful. This is just a quick review to say that I believe Mr. Simmons is right. 100% right about Saudi Aramco. My concerns about this book is that it doesn't talk about water enough. Saudi's big problems are about water. Water tables are falling. In some places, as much as 16 feet per year. I believe Saudi Arabia might stop exporting by 2018. I have no way of knowing this. It's just a feeling from having worked for Saudi Aramco Oil Company. Regards, Keith Renick, Peachtree City, Ga.

OH BOY. WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF OIL. AGAIN. GOTTA KEEP THOSE PRICES UP UP UP!

WHAT YOU NEED IS A BICYCLE AND A BUS PASS IN SUNNY TAMPA FLA. AND ANOTHER COLD BEER...

MAYBE THE BUS WILL BE A HYBRID RUNNING ON B80 BIO-DIESEL.

DON'T WORRY JUST BE HAPPY...

This is a fairly long and detailed book on Saudi oil production. It talks about all of the different oilfields from both an historical and current point of view. Of course the fame of this book lies in the fact that it suggests the strong possibility that some Saudi oilfields may be much closer to depletion or decline than we are led to believe. That's basically a peak oil issue. However, I found the book to be interesting on a different level also. Everyone knows that Saudi Arabia is the world's largest oil producing country, but very few people probably know what the oil industry is like there. This book gives a feel for what the oilfields and related processing plants are actually like. In any case, if you are interested in peak oil, you will probably want to get around to reading this book at some point since it is referenced in a lot of other works.

This book is well written, with a lot of research....however, I do not completely agree with the author's conclusions. A book on Peak Oil. Well worth reading, but the author does not take into account the progress of technology and its significance in extracting the precious oil from the ground.
Many people do not understand that oil fields left behind by oil companies still retain a great deal of the original estimates locked within its stone. The problem is that it becomes too expensive to extract for use in the economy. That will change. Further, the US has enough oil shale to rival the largest fields in the world....additionally, the US has its own tar sands that few know about. For that matter, Russia owns two large tar sands regions within its borders. Then there is the most recent, unconfirmed, find from Petrobras off-shore of Brazil that is reputed to have ~33 billion barrels of reserves......although this remains to be proven. But it does not discount the Tupi field of the Brazilians, who are about to become major oil exporters in the next several years.
If you just take "conventional" oil and current "conventional" extraction methods, his book has a lot of credence....however, things never remain static and companies are investing large sums of money to find new ways of extracting oil from known fields that are dormant.
Good book, worth reading, but should be read in conjunction with opposing viewpoints as well.

Twilight in the Desert is widely accepted to be the best-written, best-researched, and most-informed book about peak oil and Saudi Arabia as an oil-exporter. Matthew Simmons is the foremost authority on peak oil and even the commodity in general. Whenever there is an article about this subject in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, you can be sure to find Simmons' name somewhere within. Twilight in the Desert certainly takes a particular viewpoint, but Simmons backs up his arguments with meticulously researched facts rather than opinion. The amount of research Simmons has done and the thousands upon thousands of pages he has gone through are astounding. His synthesis of this information and analysis are simply delightful. More than just dwelling on Saudi Arabia, Simmons goes into the science and geology of peak oil in an interesting and straightforward way. His arguments are beautifully laced and cogently pieced together to the point of inspiring the reader about an otherwise complicated subject.
Twilight of the Desert is so well written, it may actually be more a work of art than the academic tome it appears. If you are remotely interested in oil, I cannot recommend Twilight in the Desert highly enough.

Very interesting read on saudi arabian oil - if you are looking for specific details on oil fields and production techniques. I found it fascinating.

The book gets some of the technical facts on the oil recovery process incorrect. I know becuase I am in that business. The book is very repetitive.

Matthew covers an important premis - Saudi oil reserves are lower than we think. He may be, and probably is spot on the mark with this conclusion. However he has based his conclusion from reading 200 SPE papers on Saudi production. Whilst other sources of information are admittedly hard to come by, SPE papers are not an unbiased source of information. Invariably they set out to demonstrate a technical problem and how ingenious the authors were at solving these problems. So to conclude that Saudi production is beset by technical problems because there are so many papers written on the subject is invalid. Dull, incesant, problem free production does not make a good technical paper! That said, the conclusions on why reserves are pushed up for political means is spot on (in my experience) and his overall conclusions are probably quite valid - and important.

Peak oil. That's the 100B$ question?
Technical analysis shows as that oil is in a bull market...
If this book is right 200$ oil is not science fiction, but rather reality.
Is that the end of oil or just another milestone
in the neverending story of oil bull and bear markets.
The future will tell...

The book is very interesting.
Are we really running out of oil?
Mr.SIMMONS says we are.
In 1980 we thought the same thing and new oil was discovered.
Will history repeat itself or are we really getting near
the end of the match?
In that case I would have liked a chapter about the oil
lying in ISRAEL, the best well hidden secret in the planet,
the only and sole oil that will be kept until the end of the match.

I heard so much about this book that I started to not buy it, thinking I knew what it said. I'm very glad I read it. I spent 30 years in the oil patch and I have to say that I think the author knows what he's talking about. He makes a very good case for Saudi Arabia's oil production being on the verge of a steep decline. For more on getting ready for very expensive oil see The Long Emergency.The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

Saudi Arabia's economic foundations are increasingly fragile despite the run-up in oil prices during the past three years, driven in part by the disastrous invasion of Iraq. Simmons' work points to a looming problem - that Saudi Arabia has vastly overstated the country's oil reserves and production capacity. He gives sound technical analysis drawn from opinions of independent oil experts.

While it is an important book, the author could have covered the same ground in about half the 464 pages that he used.

For a succinct, fictionalized account of the types of non-economic problems besetting the Saudi regime and the future stability of oil markets, you might take a look at SAUDI MATCH POINT, published recently and available online from Blacksmith Books.

Some have called Simmons a doomsayer. Others a prophet. With so many reviews of this book already posted, this one will be a bulleted list of some of Simmons' most salient points:

-The last big oil fields were found in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and most are in the middle east. This small part of the world produces most of the planet's oil. With little prospect of new oil discoveries, this is the 'twilight' phenomenon of the book's title.

-The U.S. is too dependent on foreign oil. This is not new. But even if we wanted to be self sufficient, our energy infrastructure is terribly outdated. Our average drilling rigs are 25 years old, and human drillers need 10 years of training--and we're not doing a good job of training new ones.

-Bottom line: we've used too much oil and paid too little for it during the past 50 years, while we've let our global energy infrastructure get too old. Now we all (China, Russia, Europe, and the U.S. in particular) need to work together to undo 50 years of mistakes.

That's Simmons' book in brief. It's thought provoking, although certainly many consider its arguments debatable. Despite one's position on available global oil supply (as well as global warming), in its most lucid and impassioned moments 'Twilight in the Desert' is a stirring call to action.

Simmons presents a phenomenal analysis of Saudi Arabia's oil production (both their production claims & reality). In it, he presents the history of Saudi Aramco, walking you step by step through the production analysis, injecting definitions of key terms and technology primers along the way. This book presents a skeptic's view of the Saudi claims, and presents much research to back up his skepticism. One thing to note is that he never comes out and says that the Saudis are actually lying about production, but rather, suggests (rightly so), that they are not forthcoming about the reality of their situation, almost goading them into making public their production information.

I only have two minor complaints. First is that the reader is skewed into believing that the Saudis *cannot* substantially increase their production. This may be true, but the better claim would be to show that to do so would require substantial investments. Also, he never acknowledges that if the price of oil were to skyrocket, that market forced would make it quickly fall to a more reasonable level. Simmons is a financial analyst, and anyone who believes in market theory should acknowledge this, especially in a work this comprehensive.

Overall, this book will teach you more about how oil production actually occurs than anything short of a geology textbook, and presents an insight into the whole industry that is nothing short of a tour de force.

Saudi Aramco will eventually end all oil and gas production, as will all the other oil companies of the world. Recoverable oil and gas will then be gone and will no longer power our economies. No one doubts that. The question is: When? Matthew R. Simmons, "Twilight in the Desert," doubts the Saudi's claimed ability of maintaining their current production levels for the next 50 years. He suggests 5-10 years is a more realistic figure based on his research into Saudi engineering data reported at Society of Petroleum Engineers meetings, which he claims is limited by the secretiveness of Saudi Aramco. He raises the specter of a sudden unexpected decline in world oil production and calls for more open reporting by the Saudis, and the petroleum industry in general, to facilitate the world's coming transition from an oil economy to whatever is next.

I found Simmons' book to be an eye-opening look into the petroleum industry, an important side of the modern world that is unfamiliar to me, and for that I recommend the book highly. It brought home the challenges that Saudi Aramco and the oil industry face and the remarkable successes they have achieved in supplying the world with a steady flow of oil. As to Simmons' criticisms of Saudi Aramco and his conclusions I am more skeptical. Readers who are ignorant of the petroleum industry will find his arguments have a "he said, they said" quality. As such, should we, the ignorant, believe the small army of Saudi Aramco engineers, who have apparently always been responsible stewards of their oil fields and have every reason to continue being so, or should we believe Simmons, the investment banker and oil industry observer, i.e. the non-engineer outsider. I don't know, but I suspect Simmons is extrapolating from the near disasters of past problems to coming greater disasters while the engineers are focused on past successes and their ideas for future successes. Whatever the truth is, for most of us only time will tell if Simmons has a valid point. In the meantime I continue to believe that profit incentives will lead to solutions to the energy problem, provided well-meaning but narrowly focused regulators don't interfere, and I will continue looking to the oil industry for investment values.

This book could deliver its message in about 1/3 of the pages, or maybe less. Very interesting reading that should have been published as an extended white paper. If you want a view of the world's energy station that is different than what is coming out of 'Propaganda City' [Washington DC] and the current US regime, read this book. It will level the information that we all get from the US based main stream media outlets.

Wow - this is a thought-provoking, and rather scary book. I had heard of, and some reading online, of the concept of peak oil - that at some point in the future, we will reach a point where we simply cannot produce any extra oil. The world's oil production will peak, then begin to decline.

Just thinking of what we use oil for, this is a scary prospect. Cars, heating, cooling, TV, agriculture, transportation of food, health care, just to name a few...

The author is very in depth, and in being so complete, has written a rather lengthy book. This is no problem - the subject matter is fascinating, although rather dark. He does not paint a pretty picture about our future oil supplies.

His argument is simple: Saudi Arabia has been the largest producer of oil for a long long time, and the vast majority of its production has been from a handful of very old oil fields. What does this mean? Well, every other super giant oil field that has been discovered has reached a point where the faucet just won't flow any faster, and begins to decline until it is useless. If we rely on the Saudis so much, we might be in for a nasty surprise.

The author seems pretty credible, given his many years of experience in the field.