And another reason that customers like working with us is that our product is high quality, low cost and can be purchased with ease. This is reflected in our turnover, which currently stands at £3.5m to £4m.”But Mr Welch now finds himself at a developmental crossroads. He does not own the Black Circles network, which is made up of around 1,000 garages; instead, he outsources the customer-facing element of his business – ie, the fitting of tyres to vehicles.”I want to know how I can make sure that Black Circles’ reputation with our customers is maintained at the highest level down the line,” he explains.In the company’s early days, he admits the focus was more on increasing the number of garages in its network than on controlling quality. Mr Simmons feels Ghawar is vulnerable and that if its pressure drops, its production will decline and a lot of oil will be “left behind”. He has concerns about other Saudi fields too, but the main point is that if Ghawar started to decline it would mean Saudi production had peaked.The Saudi response is that estimates of “original oil in place” have grown by 20 per cent in the past 20 years and that the country can safely produce 10-15 million barrels a day for the next 50 years. That may be right – the experts seem to disagree, and as outsiders we cannot hope to judge But it is worth noting these concerns.

If a large amount of technical expertise is needed just to maintain Saudi production, any exodus of foreign experts would have consequences for future output.There is no particular reason to expect, even if these concerns are justified, that Saudi production will start to fall in the next couple of years. You would expect any problem to be a medium-term matter, not an immediate one. The trouble is that bad news has a nasty habit of coming in batches. We should not assume that the continued steady supply of Saudi Arabian oil is simply a political matter; it may also be a technical one.This need not be cause for panic. We are not going to run out of oil next week, nor next year, nor next decade. But oil supplies are likely to remain quite tight and may become tighter Tight markets increase the likelihood of price spikes.

In real terms, oil is still only half the price it was in 1980 but that led to a global recession.We also have to accept a shift in power towards Russia and other producers. (Not much of a shift to the UK, though, where production is starting to decline.) And we have to accept that energy-poor regions, such as western Europe and Japan, will have to butt into a headwind of higher prices. This is not a disaster; probably, in environmental terms, it is a good thing to make us use energy more carefully. But it is a concern.Trade talks alone can’t plant seeds of changeTwo difficulties make it hard to get to grips with international trade talks One is that they are always billed as make-or-break. Yet when they seem successful, quite justified complaints remain, and when they break down, they always restart after a while. The other is that they are tremendously detailed and it is tough for anyone not involved to grasp which bits matter.And so it is with the talks in Geneva. The starting point is that gradual trade liberalisation has, over the past 60 years, been one of the two main drivers of economic growth – the other being technology.