The shock of the new
http://economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5165296
Nov 17th 2005
From The Economist print edition
Rich, secretive and proud to be different, Saudi Arabia has always
aroused a mix of curiosity and unease, as five new books on the kingdom
show
THE past few years have uncapped an unprecedented gush of anxious,
often hostile writing about Saudi Arabia. Two statistics explain why.
First, three-quarters of the September 11th hijackers were Saudis, and
second, the kingdom contains a quarter of the world's known oil
reserves. Those numbers imply that the main source of the most
important global commodity, and one that has become in shorter supply,
is a land that also incubates monsters; in other words, the world
economy relies increasingly on a country that may be dangerously
unreliable.
Now consider a worse scenario. What if that Saudi oil was really not so
abundant after all? This is the possibility proposed by Matthew
Simmons, a respected Texan energy investment analyst, in "Twilight in
the Desert". Mr Simmons's argument, based on careful correlation of
the surprisingly sparse facts available on Saudi oil production, is
simple. The kingdom has produced around 100 billion barrels, and claims
to hold 260 billion more. This figure has been widely accepted, yet the
last time outsiders estimated Saudi reserves, before the
nationalisation of the oil industry in the 1980s, they were reckoned at
less than half this amount.
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