Quote from Businessman:
The past does not matter as supply was able to meet demand,
this is no longer the case (at these price levels anyway)
There is no upside limit. Oil will go to the higest bidder, eventually
it will reach a price where it is so expensive that alot of people
wont be able to afford it and then at the price it will stabilise
(for a short period atleast).
At $60-$100 oil is still affordable.
At $100 and above it starts getting painfull and demand will start
to fall because people will start to cut back on usage (drive much less etc).
Until demand falls the price will continue to rise.
Your thesis suggest that no new supplies of oil will be coming on stream in spite of the flood of billions of dollars invested in new E&P projects.
A different take on the subject by Pullitzer Prize winning author Daniel Yergin:
"
BREATHING ROOM
It's not the end of the Oil Ageâ yet
Supply squeeze will ease. We should use the gift of time wisely
By DANIEL YERGIN
WE'RE not running out of oil. Not yet.
"Shortage" is certainly in the air â and in the price. Right now, the oil market is tight, even tighter than it was on the eve of the 1973 oil crisis. In this high-risk market, "surprises" ranging from political instability to hurricanes could send oil prices spiking higher. Last week, the death of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd rattled the markets, despite the smooth and long-anticipated succession to Crown Prince Abdullah. Moreover, the specter of an energy shortage is not limited to oil. Natural gas supplies are not keeping pace with growing demand. Even supplies of coal, which generates about half of the country's electricity, are constrained at a time when our electric power system has been tested by an extraordinary heat wave.
But it is oil that gets most of the attention. Prices around $60 a barrel, driven by high demand growth, are fueling the fear of imminent shortage â that the world is going to begin running out of oil in five or 10 years. This shortage, it is argued, will be amplified by the substantial and growing demand from two giants: China and India.
Yet this fear is not borne out by the fundamentals of supply. Our new, field-by-field analysis of production capacity, led by my colleagues Peter Jackson and Robert Esser, is quite at odds with the current view and leads to a strikingly different conclusion: There will be a large, unprecedented buildup of oil supply in the next few years. Between 2004 and 2010, capacity to produce oil (not actual production) could grow by 16 million barrels a day â from 85 million barrels per day to 101 million barrels a day â a 20 percent increase. Such growth over the next few years would relieve the current pressure on supply and demand"
full:
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/outlook/3299350
DS