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One of the greatest questions of the modern world concerns whether our recoverable oil supplies will decrease faster than we can replace them with economical new energy sources. If we can keep up, then civilization can continue relatively unchanged and make the leap to the next stage of development. If not, then our modern civilization will face a resource shortfall that could spell the end of our way of life, much like other resource shortfalls have wiped out ancient civilizations.

A pivotal issue in this question is the ability of Saudi Arabia to not only maintain its current output of around 8 million barrels of oil a day, but to increase that rate of production as needed by the world, and to maintain these prolific rates for decades to come. Saudi Arabia claims it can keep up the same level of production for 50 years if necessary, and most of the world, even energy planners who should know better, take them at their word. But if their claims are wrong, it is the whole world that will suffer.

Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, Matthew Simmons believes it is very likely that Saudi Arabia’s oil production rate has already peaked or will peak shortly and will then face sharp declines. Everyone believes that Saudi Arabia is sitting on massive oil reserves, but few people ever actually see specific production data to really understand just how much oil is flowing out of Saudi Arabia. For example, Ghawar, Saudi Arabia’s primary oil field, is the greatest oil-bearing structure the world has ever known. Through the last half of the 20th century, Ghawar has produced over 55 billion barrels of oil, almost 60 percent of Saudi Arabia’s total output. Saudi Arabia’s five major secondary fields are still impressive giants in their own right but still can’t keep up with the prolific production of Ghawar.

But what happens when Ghawar and these secondary giants runs dry?

Unfortunately, Saudi Arabia has stopped publishing field by field oil production data, making it very difficult for outside observers to prove or disprove the Saudi government’s claims of sufficient reserves and the ability to scale production as necessary.

To get around this problem, Simmons had to resort to secondary information to piece together a picture of current Saudi Arabia oil reserves and production challenges. If there is one thing this book excels at, it’s providing detailed evidence to support its contentions - there are pages, and pages, and pages of quotations and analysis of government documents and technical papers submitted to the Society of the Petroleum Engineers from Saudi engineers. You will learn more than you ever wanted to know about geological formations that contain oil, the problems that arise in aging oil fields, and the technology being used and developed to combat these problems.

Many nights the material was so dry that I could only get through a few pages before I was too tired to continue and turned off the light to go to bed. Seriously, the middle half of this book is very dry. Not that it doesn’t do an admirable job of explaining the intricacies of petroleum drilling to a lay audience, but the author feels compelled to cover every major oil field in Saudi Arabia in depth (to defuse critics who may point to skipped oil fields as the missing reserves) as well as other aging giant oil fields around the world.

The other issue adding to the difficulty of the material is that much of the same technical challenges occur at every aging oil field. It only takes a few minutes of reading about a new oil field before the reader thinks “I know where this is heading.” This repetition does however drive home a critical point: aging oil fields pretty much all have the same qualities and face the same problems the world over. Ghawar and the rest of Saudi Arabia’s giant oil fields are not “special” - their production will fall off and Saudi Arabia does not have other large fields waiting in the wings to take their place.

Where this book does become rather interesting lies in what happens if you grant the author his basic argument about current and likely future Saudi oil productions rates. If the author is right, then it means the Saudis no longer have any real ability to increase the production rates. This may begin to explain why whenever everyone starts blaming the Saudis for high gas prices, they never increase their supply and blame refiners instead. Certainly, refiners may be the bottleneck, but Saudi Arabia may also be unable to boost production to assuage public criticism.

Twilight in the Desert is an interesting read, especially for someone interested in oil production, world resource issues, or just general engineering problems. However, it is not for the faint of heart and is certainly not a quick read.

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I’ve managed to start making a dent in my giant pile of books to read (at the expense of not keeping up with my pile of magazines to read). One great book I just finished is the Empty Cradle by Phillip Longman. The basic idea put forth is that we’re facing massive under-population in the next century.

Yes, under-population.

I was scratching my head when I read that in the first chapter myself. However, Longman then proceeds to cite multiple sources to back up his claim. He argues that while we will still continue to have absolute population growth for several decades due to the momentum of the baby boomers, our fertility rates already have or are very close to falling below replacement levels, leaving a shortage of young people.

Researching the citations in controversial books usually results in unadulterated anger as you find evidence that the author is pretty much lying with their numbers (I’m talking about you Ann Coulter). However, I did not encounter that as I looked up some of Longman’s sources. The one I really found fascinating was the 2003 World Fertility Report by the Populate Division of the United Nations.

One paragraph from the Executive Summary says it all:

Taking 2.1 children per woman to represent a level of fertility ensuring population replacement when mortality is low, fertility levels in 12 developed countries were below
replacement level in the 1970s whereas just one developing country had a similarly low level of fertility. By the 1990s, the number of developed countries with below-replacement fertility had increased to 41 and that of developing countries stood at 19. In 14 developed countries, total fertility was lower than 1.3 children per woman, a level unprecedented for large populations in recorded history.

Now, you might say: “OK, so fertility is below replacement levels in some developed countries, thats what immigration is for.” That used to be the case, but notice the dropping fertility rates in developing countries as well. Mexico, for example, has had a declining fertility rate from 6.2 in 1974 to 2.7 in 1996. That means in a few decades, all the hoopla about illegal immigrants will go away, because we’ll be out of immigrants. All the excess population coming over the border was from the high fertility rates 20 years ago, their population is leveling off, which means the pressure to go elsewhere to work will also slacken.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. Everyone knew that the aging population and the retiring baby boomers were a problem. Everyone throws up ideas like raising the retirement age, working into retirement, privatizing social security so returns will be greater. These are all great ideas for giving a retiree more money, but if there isn’t anyone around to perform services or produce goods in exchange for that money, then all the money in the world doesn’t do a retiree any good.

The book also delves into why the fertility rate in developed countries are falling. Certainly the wide availability of safe birth control is a factor, but it really just allows people the choice. Why are they choosing to have less kids. From personal experience I’ll tell you why we waited five years to have our first CrazyBaby and why we plan on spacing them out: children are fraking expensive. And unlike only a few generations ago where children could be put to work in the family enterprise at a relatively young age, a person these days doesn’t really become any kind of economic asset until after college, long after they’ve stopped contributing to my household.

Between daycare costs (or take the hit of less income if one of the CrazyEngineers quit working to raise the little one), growing education costs (because they’re completely closing the libraries out here due to budget shortfalls, I kid you not), and food costs; I’m shelling out almost a million per little CrazyEngineer to get them a 4 year degree and out into the world where they benefit society by working and paying taxes. But I don’t see one dime of that return on investment; society, including all the DINKs (double income, no kids), enjoys the benefits of my economic sacrifice.

Of course, there is one group in the United States that still has a high fertility rate: fundies. People whose moral beliefs outweigh economic concerns are still just pushing out those babies. And home-schooling them. And teaching them how all homosexuals are going to hell. And teaching them that abstinence is the only form of birth control. And teaching them that Fox News is always right.

Any non-delusional people out there have a problem with this? Damn straight you do. So instead of only having one or two kids, have three or four. Take a hit for the human race, because we all know that our species is doomed if those that believe the human race is only 6,000 years old are the ones in charge.

The book does offer up some suggestions at the end for how our society can encourage educated, liberal, working couples to have more children. Some aren’t bad, like parents paying less Social Security and Medicare taxes because they’re producing little workers who themselves will pay into Social Security and Medicare. However, as the book repeats several times, major changes in the way society values children need to be made, and those changes simply will not happen until disaster is on the immediate horizon. Which of course might be too late and will require more painful efforts than if the solution was put in place today.

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