I'm not that knowledgeable about oil though I've been watching some of these issues for almost thirty years. I've been reading The Oil Drum for several months now and appreciate what is being said though I wish the facts in general were a little easier to nail down no matter whether those facts come from Washington, Houston or Saudi Arabia.

But oil minister's Ali al-Naimi's comments seem to go beyond the usual industry blather, honest speculation, and deliberate misdirection. If there's truth to what he's saying, it seems to me that this is potentially a foreign policy issue that's being raised and one that can't be ignored by the U.S.

Here are five possibilities this novice sees: 1) Ali al-Naimi is lying and perhaps his lying is coming out of some degree of panic.

2. He's lying in order to temporarily manipulate the markets. I take it from various sources that the Saudis are frequently untruthful but when a lie has foreign policy consequences, we're in a different ball game.

3. He's lying under the mistaken impression that he's doing something useful by soothing the economic waters of the international community. Such a lie simply puts off dealing with the issues and is dangerous.

4. He thinks he's telling the truth and is gullible enough to believe that Saudi Arabia has suddenly discovered in the last few weeks that it has huge additional reserves no one knew about. (Could this be related at all to recent changes in the Saudi government?)

5. He is telling the truth and Saudi Arabia has been playing games for decades by withholding vital information and manipulating markets (which on a certain tolerated scale they seem to have been doing anyway for years but this would be of a whole different order). Governments and companies around the world are making plans on what may be happening to oil. Not billions, but trillions of dollars will be involved in the next twenty years as the world begins to shift towards alternative energy sources and the machines that will use those sources. At that scale, we're talking about the fundamental security of the U.S. and most industrialized nations (actually third world countries are even more vulnerable to such disruptions). It's going to take time to build the infrastructure for alternative energy and the biggest threat to that infrastructure, if not handled correctly, would be a sudden glut of cheap oil for five to ten years that would make it difficult to sustain that infrastructure and the knowledge-base that built it, thus putting the world's economies at greater risk when a transition can no longer be put off. Such a discovery might come but that's one issue (and perhaps manageable through diplomacy). To deliberately create such a situation through manipulation (or even price manipulations that disrupt economies) would be something else altogether. That would constitute a security threat. Ali al-Naimi has to be aware of that kind of analysis of his announcement.

So I don't know what to think but I'm inclined to believe in the first three possibilities. Of course there may be other explanations for the oil minister's comments.