Editor’s Note: Meeting the Challenge is an open-ended series from EnergytechStocks.com intended to build a blueprint for how the world can meet the incredible increase in all forms of energy that will be needed by 2030 without endangering the environment or nations’ security. In the coming weeks and months, recognized experts will share their ideas, and important new investment themes (including some that could turn out to be worth many billions of dollars) should emerge.

Posted: September 6, 2007

At the next meeting of the leaders of the world’s developed countries, a resolution should be passed requiring all oil producers – both state-owned and privately-held – to provide quarterly production data that have been independently verified.

So says Matthew Simmons, the energy investment banker who has railed in the past about how the failure of Saudi Arabia and other major oil producers to provide transparent production data has left the world in a lurch, unable to know whether it can maintain an adequate supply of oil in the face of burgeoning demand, especially from China and India. Such uncertainty has led to indecision about whether the world should invest the huge sums of money necessary to develop alternative transportation fuel sources.

To meet the challenge of securing the world’s energy future, Simmons told EnergyTechStocks.com that any producer that was unwilling to provide such data should be required to pay a stiff “transparency fine.”

Simmons caustically said that his idea would work because OPEC considers the major developed countries of Europe to be its piggybank and would not want to see that arrangement jeopardized.

Simmons said that Western oil companies like ExxonMobil also would be strongly opposed to the idea of transparent data because it would reveal “how crappy and old their fields really are.”

Simmons’ comments reflect a man who, after many years of locking horns with oil princes over whether the world has less oil than official estimates, is still unable to get the only people who know the truth to provide a complete picture. They reflect the frustration of an oil analyst who believes the public’s right to know is getting short shrift.

Part 3 of Simmons Series will run on Monday, September 10