RIP Matthew Simmons

Matt Simmons was just featured in the posting: WIll BP Go Bust Or WILL BP Recover Back To $52?

Yes, recently Simmons said that BP could go bust!

• “They have $5 billion in cash, a $5 billion line of credit, and a $10B emergency line of credit,” says Simmons, “and they boast about how their operating cash flow is $17 billion per quarter. But that’s all consumed in capital expenditures. This outlay [the $20 billion] is going to consumer everything they have.”

On Bloomberg: 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.
  
  Simmons, 67, died in an accidental drowning at his home in Maine, local officials said....
  
  Emergency medical workers responded to Simmons’s home a little before 10 p.m. local time yesterday, said John Dietter, a crew chief in North Haven, Maine. The official cause of death is drowning, and he was found in a hot tub, said Tara Harrington, medical associate at Maine’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner.
  
  “It was an accident,” Harrington said today in a telephone interview. She said “heart disease” was listed for the category of “other significant conditions” on the death certificate.
  
  ‘Very Good Analyst’
  
  “He was somebody that was very comfortable challenging conventional wisdom, someone that thought beyond the near term and was a very good analyst in terms of identifying big trends,” said Dan Pickering, who worked at Simmons & Co. from 1996 to 2004 and is now co-president of the Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. investment bank in Houston.
  
  On a tour of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry in 2003, Simmons was inspired to estimate the world’s largest oil reserves, and from research that included poring through neglected engineering data, determined that the country was close to or nearing peak output, Peter Maass wrote in his book, “Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil.”
  
  “He built his own energy firm and, having done that successfully, used his knowledge of the industry to challenge one of its biggest accepted truths -- that there are nearly unlimited quantities of oil in the world,” Maass said today in an e-mail.....
  

Here's a new tribute written on Matt Simmons: Death of A Gentleman: Matthew Simmons Dead at 67

• Matt Simmons was hard working. He loved to talk about energy issues and weigh in on big subjects. He was passionate about his work. But more than all of that, he was a real gentleman.

RIP Mr. Simmons!