Or so the Saudis would have us believe. A top Saudi official says the Kingdom has plenty of oil:
Saudi Arabia has plenty of oil – more than the world is likely to need – along with an increasing ability to refine crude oil into gasoline and other products before selling it overseas, a top Saudi official says. “The world is more likely to run out of uses for oil than Saudi Arabia is going to run out of oil,” Adel al-Jubeir, top foreign policy adviser for Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Abdullah, said Wednesday … “If we send more oil to the United States and you can’t refine it, it’s not going to become gasoline,” al-Jubeir said. The United States has not built a refinery since the 1970s, and other markets have similarly outmoded or limited refining capacity.
How should we interpret this?
I spoke with a senior oil analyst a couple of weeks ago, and heard the same sentiment from him. What’s actually going on? How much oil do the Saudis really have? Will there really be a world shortage, or Hubbert peak, as all of us round here have come to accept? Could we be wrong?
[Jerome a Paris: I’m asking you, specifically!]