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.
Article comments
1 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Just a brief question for the CrazyEngineer... Does this book talk about the falling quality of oil being mined?
2 - CrazyEngineer
Very much so. Much of the book is spent on the rising water cut (% of water in the oil being produced) of various fields and strategies being employed to counter the problem.
It also discusses the raw quality of the crude oil (sweet vs sour, light vs heavy) of the different Saudi fields, and how many of the fields that the Saudis are pointing to as future production sources actually contain low-quality oil that will be expensive to process.
3 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Thank you. I had the feeling that this was the case. About a week ago, a friend of mine took me to one of Jerusalem's major book stores and pointed out a book that talked about the falling quality of oil being produced - and told me that one of the signs of the imminent arrival of the messiah would be "the oil would go bad."
This is what Mr. Simmons documents.