Текст 5
"How long have you known him? What's he like?"
"Since Christmas. He's from Seattle and he spent Christmas with friends of mine in Greenwich is how 1 happened to meet him. I sat next to him at dinner the night after Christmas, and he was the quiet type, 1 thought. He looked to be the quiet type. So I found out what he did and I began talking about gastroenterostomies and stuff and he just sat there and nodded all the time I was talking. You know, when I was going to be a nurse a year before last. Finally I said something to him. I asked him if by any chance he was listening to what I was saying, or bored, or what? "No, not bored," he said. "Just cockeyed." And he was. Cockeyed. It seems so long ago and so hard to believe we were ever strangers like that, but that's how 1 met him, or my first conversation with him. Actually he's very good. His family have loads of money from the lumber business and I've never seen anything like the way he spends money. But only when it doesn't interfere with his work at P. and S. He has a Packard that he keeps in Greenwich and hardly ever uses except when he comes to see me. He was a marvellous basket-ball player at Dartmouth and two weeks ago when he came up to our house he hadn't had a golf stick in his hands since last summer and he went out and shot an eighty-seven. He's very homely, but he has this dry sense of humor that at first you don't quite know whether he's even listening to you, but the things he says. Sometimes I think—oh, not really, but a stranger overhearing him might suggest sending him to an alienist."
Текст 6
You want an independent and informed appraisal of the outlook for energy? Then Charley Maxwell's your man. For almost 50 years, Maxwell in one way or another has been involved in the oil and gas industry: from when he started working for Mobil in 1957 to when he moved to Wall Street in 1968 and was routinely lauded as the No. 1 oil analyst throughout the Seventies and Eighties. For more than 20years, he's belonged to an elite group of industry executives and OPEC members that meets at Oxford University twice a year to assess trends. We dialed him up last week at Weeden & Co., the institutional trading company in Greenwich, Conn., that he's called home since 1999. Here are Maxwell's thoughts on the current energy scene.
Barron's: Did somebody say energy crisis?
Maxwell: We often say there are not a lot of advantages to getting old except that we have seen it all before. After a big move upward, there is always some counterreaction. We saw it during the 1973-74 crisis, in the '79 to '86 crisis and then in the two wars with Iraq. These crises were manipulations of the oil market by human beings. War, economic problems, but particularly military considerations, were creating, as they say, facts on the ground that worked into shortages that were real, but they were shortages created by the actions of man not nature. It is terribly important to differentiate between past periods and now.
Q: How is that?
A: There are four huge impediments to expanding production in a world in which we need to do this. Hubbert's Peak, the theory that says oil production will peak on a global basis, is a natural impediment. It is not yet the predominant factor but as these crises continue it is the one growing exponentially and by, say, 2015 or 2020 I expect it will dominate the outlook.
Q: What then is the biggest problem now?
A: About three-quarters of the world's production of oil today is lifted by national oil companies. Companies like Saudi Aramco, Petrobras, the Iran national oil company, the Iraq national oil company, the national companies that operate in Algeria and Libya, produce conservatively 75% of the world supply. Most of them were nationalized in the 70s and early 80s and they have real structural problems today. They bring in a lot of money but most of it goes to support the national Treasuries and the various political constituencies that are in favor in the various countries, whether it's the army or a host of other bureaucratic ministries. In the end, in the political battle for budgetary support the national oil companies tend to be a constituency with little or no political influence. All in all, the national oil companies have been shortchanged and held on a poverty diet for a long time.
Q: What are the other structural challenges they face?
A: What came out of the \9S6-\9S7 collapse in prices was a huge overcapacity of about 20% in the world's oil production system. The international oil companies began to adjust their capital spending quickly to adapt to that and they more or less serviced a 1% increase in demand each year. The capacity surplus began to come down naturally. We have now had 20 years and taken that surplus down to about 2% to 3%. For efficiency in the energy industry, given the weather factors and political factors and so on, we need something in the 7% to 8% range of excess capacity in order to cover the mountains and the plains of demand and weather and political events. But when the surplus got down to those levels between 1997 and 2000, the companies didn't add to capacity at a fast enough rate.
Q: Bring this back to your point about the national oil companies.
A: The national oil companies didn't react at all. At least the big international oil companies were producing the 1% to 2% each year that was required, but the national oil companies just tooled along on the backs of the surplus while it got smaller and smaller. The big international oil companies saw all this and didn't prepare for possible future tightening. One reason the NOCs, as the national oil companies are called, didn't respond was lack of money. Also, the NOCs, because of political patronage, have a shortage of skilled workers and experienced managers. Only Saudi Aramco is quite efficient and they are doubling and redoubling their efforts to find oil in the peninsula. They've gone from 10 rigs to 100 rigs and are headed to 125 rigs. They are modern and up to date. They've got a core of around 3,000 expatriates that are well paid and doing a helluva job. But this is unusual.