I'm glad to say that it isn't ignorant old Otto that's calling a barrel of crude at $20 to $40 by year's end, but a couple of experts that actually know what they're talking about. Frankly, if I were The Studmuffin I'd be hedging my whole country's output right now. Here's the must-read link to the LA Times article and here are a couple of excerpts to get your juices running."The reasons are simple, said Philip K. Verleger Jr., an expert on energy markets at the University of Calgary in Canada: The still-sputtering economy has lessened demand at a time when there is already a big surplus of oil."That is the largest and longest continuous glut of supply that I have seen in 30 years of following energy prices," Verleger said. "It's a huge surplus. There has never been anything like it."
"For eight straight months, oil supplies have been running about 2 million barrels a day higher than the global demand of 83 million barrels a day, Verleger said. Eventually, he and others predicted, suppliers will tire of paying to store all of the surplus oil and flood the market.
"The market will eventually correct itself, pushing prices down, Fadel Gheit, senior energy analyst for Oppenheimer & Co., wrote in a note to investors. "Excessive speculation and a weak dollar have lifted oil prices to levels not sustainable by market fundamentals," Gheit wrote.
"With so much oil available and so little need for that amount, investors, oil companies and even some banks have bought and stored surplus oil everywhere they can. By one estimate, before oil surged to its high this year of $73.38 a barrel in June, as many as 67 supertankers -- each capable of carrying 2 million barrels of oil -- were being used as floating storage.
"Verleger said it represented a largely risk-free investment for those who could sell that oil for huge profits on the futures markets. But the glut has gone on for so long, he said, that the cost of all of that storage is bound to rise. When it rises enough, some suppliers will refuse to pay and a lot of that oil will be dumped onto the market. "Oil will drop to $20 a barrel by the end of the year because this situation just cannot be sustained," Verleger said.
"Bob van der Valk, a fuel price analyst, predicted that oil would drop to $40 by the end of the year and that Californians would be paying about $2 a gallon for regular gasoline. "In normal years you have seasonally adjusted pricing, and 2009 is looking like our first normal year since 2006," Van der Valk said. "By year's end, oil and gasoline will be coming down."
