Say you shake a bottle of champagne before opening it, and champagne sprays around and everyone is cheerfully soaked. But if you then put the bottle down, you would see that the gas pressure in the wine, has only pushed out about a third, or less, of the wine out of the bottle. That is, sort of, what happens with an oil well.

It is more than a year since oil prices doubled, but what are the oil companies doing? Some exploration continues but little net increase in refining capacity is planned and most of their effort seems to be going into mergers and takeovers. What do they know that they haven’t told us?

So just who is this super-spike man, and what in the world was he thinking? Well, his name is Arjun Murti, and he’s a veteran oil analyst and a managing director at Goldman. Press-shy by nature anyway, the poor guy was so unsettled by the reaction to his report that he refused all interview requests—until, that is, I was able to persuade him to take my call.

For those wanting to know about the situation in Saudi Arabia or wanting an advance look at Simmons’s book “Twilight In The Desert” or what will likely be his presentation in Edinburgh, this PDF presentation will be of key interest.

“I think they’re [the Saudis] near capacity, and so we’ve just got to get a straight answer from the government as to what they think their excess capacity is,” Bush said, adding that he would not characterize the Saudi production as “flat-out” yet. (updated 21 April)