Reply #11: Statement By Matt Simmons That Seems Related To The Production Hold [View All]

[Strelnikov_]

http://www.financialsense.com/transcriptions/Simmons.html

JP: So, based on your study – and in fact you state this in your book – you believe there is no way that Saudi Arabia is going to be able to produce 20-25 million barrels?

MS: No, that’s impossible. What’s interesting is that now there are a number of people within Saudi Arabia that are starting to say publicly, “No, that’s impossible.” Dr. Sadad Al-Husseini who was eased out of being Executive Vice-President of Saudi Aramco a year ago February, because I’m told, he was actually starting to scold people for being naive about how much they could produce, has been on record in several different places as saying that Saudi Arabia could never produce over 12 million bpd. It is just not in the cards. And he was known by everyone who counted as the brains of Saudi Aramco. So we should be listening carefully, and I’m going to be very curious to see in the new regime change whether there’s some jobs that start to change, because I have a sneaking suspicion that my book is going to educate some people in Saudi Arabia to what the real issues were. And maybe some heads were going to roll – not literally – of people that have been promoting this concept of ‘don’t worry about our oil’. And we’re going to go back to a return to the conservationists within Saudi Arabia, and see them lower their rates of production, so they can sustain it for a longer period of time. And if that happens, I think I’ve done Saudi Arabia a great favor because I’ve given them grounds to do that, without the world thinking, “these crazy people in the Middle East are trying to blackmail us.”