Matt Simmons, a long time friend of the Maine coast and its islands and a student of the winds and waters of the Gulf of Maine, loved to tell the story of his first trip to Maine, courtesy of a labor strike while he worked construction one summer as a college student in his home state of Utah. When a labor dispute suddenly shut down the construction site, he and a buddy were only too happy to collect their strike checks and head out on a jaunt. They went north into the Canadian Rockies then turned right and headed toward the Inscrutable East, dipping back down into the United States via the border at Jackman, where they drove along the shores of Moosehead Lake before ending up in Boston. On a lark, Matt ducked into the Harvard Business School, which had not had a long history at that point of actively recruiting students from Mormon country in Utah, but the visit was enough to entice him to apply and enroll. Matt loved telling that story because it held the kinds of mutually opposed contradictions he loved to explore-a businessman who owed his right future to a labor strike. If genius is the ability to hold mutually opposing ideas in the mind at the same time without being paralyzed, Matt Simmons would certainly qualify.
Wick Skinner, another friend of the Maine coast and islands, who was a professor and dean at the Business School, once described Matt as the brightest student he ever taught there. After Matt received his MBA, Wick hired him to write case studies and Matt completed more in a shorter period than any student had ever attempted. Matt worked out of a small basement office, where one day a beautiful recent graduate of Connecticut College, Ellen Lougee, dropped by. When it turned out that Ellen had spent all her childhood summers on the shores of Moosehead Lake with her family, one can only imagine the ardor with which Matt expounded on his inspirational automobile trip along the shores of Moosehead Lake, in such convincing terms that she would become Mrs. Ellen Simmons.
Matt might have gone on to complete a PhD under Wick Skinner, but he was restless; in fact ceaselessly so. Matt was an entrepreneur at heart and opened an office in Boston as a financial analyst. His first client was a wild man, another maverick who had perfected the art of mixing nitrogen and helium gas ratios, an endeavor that had killed lesser men, which enabled him to SCUBA dive to greater depths than anyone else off the coast of California. Matt immediately recognized the commercial value of this arcane knowledge for the fledgling oil services business that was moving into deeper and deeper waters, whereupon Matt raised the capital to enable their company to grow rapidly. When the venture went public a few years later at spectacularly attractive multiples on the original investments, Matt was off and running. Matt moved Simmons International to Houston, and he became a pillar of the energy establishment as an investment banker to the oil services industry and then later for the entire energy sector. He never looked back-almost, that is.
The one place Matt did return was Maine. He and Ellen and their five daughters kept coming back to Maine year after year, to Rockport, where they built Alcott House, a beautiful Maine coast shingle style cottage with lovely Scandinavian motifs. They bought an island in the Muscle Ridge Channel, and became founding members of the Island Institute before Matt joined its board of trustees, where they have supported scholarships for island graduates. For recreation, Matt painted exquisite watercolors of the Maine coast and islands and his extensive travel adding yet another contradiction to his iconoclastic personality.
Although Matt was something of a climate change skeptic, we shared an interest in how fossil fuel supply and demand would affect our economy-global economics was Matt’s concern; island economics was mine. Five years ago, Matt published a careful study of the petroleum reserves in Saudi Arabian “super giant” oil fields, Twilight in the Desert, and almost overnight became the most visible spokesperson for King Hubbert’s “peak oil” hypothesis. The global financial meltdown has confounded Matt’s prediction of $200 per barrel oil, but his peak oil predictions have not yet been disproved.
Three years ago, Matt extended his restless maverick streak by founding the Ocean Energy Institute in Rockland to serve as a research, policy and analysis “think tank” on the potential of the ocean to help supply the world’s economy with new sources of energy. Only an energy industry insider with Matt’s breadth of view and depth of knowledge could have attracted the seemingly mutually opposed proponents of hard-headed energy exploration and inveterately hopeful alternative energy investors. The Ocean Energy Institute was instrumental in capturing the attention of the entire political establishment in Maine, including the Governor who convened the state’s Offshore Energy Task Force. Now that the State of Maine is about to release a Request for Proposals for the first offshore wind farm in the Gulf of Maine, Matt’s vision is very much alive.
His loss leaves a hole in the heart of the Midcoast, large as the ocean.