$65 oil is coming (maybe)

A top analyst expects crude prices to start plummeting. If you don’t believe it, you’re not the only one, and a few stocks look good if you’re in the skeptics’ camp.

If you’re frustrated over the high cost of gasoline at the pump, don’t trade in your Hummer for a Vespa just yet: A leading energy analyst is telling clients these days to prepare for crude oil to retreat back below $65 per barrel over the next three years.

How could it happen? He says conservation, new drilling, efficient new vehicles, alternative energy sources, a rising dollar and a global recession will combine to blast prices back to the Stone Age — or at least to last year’s levels.


“The match has struck, the fuse has been lit, and four or five years from now OPEC producers are going to be drinking their own oil and choking on it,” says Tony Kolton, the founder and president of Logical Information Machines, a provider of research to most of the world’s major energy-trading companies for two decades.

Plenty of smart analysts disagree with this point of view, figuring that emerging-market demand will pump up fossil-fuel prices and that Americans will blithely forget all about conservation if gasoline prices trend lower. But since Kolton’s view is deeply out of consensus and at least minimally plausible, it does deserve our attention.

MSN