Updates below.
From Jesse's Café Américain:
In addition to promoting alternative energy, Matt Simmons was also a noted proponent of the 'peak oil' theory. He was also an outspoken critic of BP and the US government, and their handling of the Gulf Oil spill.Updates. First up the WSJ's Deal Journal:
His most recent extended interview on the Gulf Oil spill was on King News World in July.
Be he right or wrong, as time will tell, he was a human being with a family and friends who loved him. His untimely death is their loss, and we should remember this even as he becomes a target for political back and forth, given his involvement in controversial topics.
Kennebec Journal
Energy expert Simmons dies in North Haven
By Tux Turkel
Matthew Simmons, an international oil expert who most recently focused on developing renewable energy from the waters off Maine, died Sunday night of an apparent heart attack, his office is reporting. He was 67.
Simmons founded the Ocean Energy Institute in 2007, hosting a grand opening of its new office last month in Rockland. The goal of the think tank and venture capital fund was to attract investment in research to make Maine a global leader in offshore wind and other ocean energy sources.
According to police reports, Simmons suffered a heart attack while in a hot tub at his home on North Haven. An autopsy is planned for today in Augusta, according to the Knox County Sheriff's Office.
Simmons was a leading energy investment banker, a former energy adviser to President George W. Bush, and author. He wrote the 2005 book “Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy,” which laid out an argument that the world was approaching peak oil production.
Without Matt Simmons: Has Peak Oil, Well, Peaked?
...Simmons is best known for raising the alarm, in books, in lectures, television interviews and to anyone who would listen, that the world’s oil reserves had peaked.And from Bloomberg:
The concept of “peak oil” wasn’t new when Simmons wrote Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, in 2005. In fact, peak oil was first posited by a geophysicist named M. King Hubbert in the 1950s who predicted that world oil supply would peak in 1995.
But Simmons helped to being the theory to the mass media, after traveling to Saudi Arabia in 2003 to research that nation’s secretive data on oil reserves, or the amount of oil able to be pumped out of the ground. His book became an instant classic among conspiracy theorists. It gained mainstream exposure when, in the summer of 2008, crude-oil prices began spiking to $147 a barrel and American drivers were getting crushed at the gas pump.
“I find it ironic that here we have the biggest industry on earth, and I’m one of the few people to figure out that we have a major problem,’’ Simmons told Fortune in September 2008. “And I did it all in my spare time....MORE
Matthew Simmons, Peak-Oil Advocate and Simmons & Co. Founder, Dies at 67
Matthew R. Simmons, an energy investment banker and a leading proponent of the “peak oil” theory that claims the Earth is running out of crude, died yesterday.
Earlier:
Simmons, 67, died in an accidental drowning at his home in Maine, local officials said.
Simmons started Houston-based Simmons & Co. in May 1974 with a focus on the oil-services industry, according to the company’s website. The firm expanded to offer research, institutional sales and investment banking in the energy industry. Simmons promoted the idea that world oil reserves are peaking, and he explored the implications in a 2005 book called “Twilight in the Desert.”
“In the history of the petroleum era, Matt Simmons will be remembered for calling attention to ‘peak oil,’” T. Boone Pickens, chairman of BP Capital LLC, said in an e-mailed statement. “You had to admire his advocacy and his ability to focus on the need to better prepare for a new energy future.”...MORE
"Is Matt Simmons Credible?" (BP)
"Matt Simmons Says Gulf Clean Up Will Cost Over $1 Trillion, Sees BP At $1, Says "We Have Now Killed The GoM'" (BP)
Matthew R. Simmons Retires as Chairman Emeritus of Simmons & Company International to Dedicate his Full Attention to The Ocean Energy Institute (BP)
Barron's Tiernan Ray Gets the Goods on Matt Simmons Thinking Re a BP Bankruptcy (BP)
Bizarre: Simmons & Co. Upgrades BP from Neutral to Overweight (BP)
British Petroleum: A Month From Chapter 11? (BP)
