Always a good time at The Oil Drum.

A great interview with Matt Simmons, an article about a petroleum engineer arguing Matt's wrong about Saudi Arabia, and a further article from Resource Investor that goes into greater detail.

A rig shortage till 2010? Thinking oil service?

MS: We won't bring on that new capacity, we're out of drilling rigs. It's too bad people didn't realize we're running out of rigs and we won't resolve the rig problem until well after 2010. But to call it a field-by-field bottoms up and then just have a notional idea... if a field does not have a name today, it won't be done by the end of 2009. We just would not have time. The whole thing is typical of the analysis they did when they assured all of their clients that we had abundant robust natural gas, all these pessimists about natural gas are just flat wrong. And they did a bottom-up study then too. And they did the bottoms up story then, too. And they turned out, unfortunately, to be as wrong as me promising that there is a Santa Claus, and you finding that there wasn't.