Countdown to 100$ oil – Your bets for 2006

Well, barring a major geopolitical event in the next two days, it looks like my bet on 100$/bl oil by the end of this year will be conclusively lost. I will announce the winner of the price forecast contest (from both the DailyKos thread and the Eurotrib thread) from last August this weekend or early next week, but, undaunted, I’d like to take bets on 2006.

This time, I have four questions. Each will have, like this year, a prize consisting of a bottle of, at your choice, French champagne or whiskey.
…Oil is currently around 56-57$/bl (the above graph is for Brent, from oilnergy.com), and briefly touched 70$/bl right after Katrina hit. So, pretty impressive prices, but not quite 100$/bl yet. Natural gas prices got closer, with prices briefly going over 90$/boe (barrel of oil equivalent – use the price per mbtu and multiply by 5.9) in early December, but that’s not what we bet on…

With hindsight, the natural gas story has been even more dramatic than the oil one, with still a fairly high probability of shortages this winter in both the USA and the UK, following the faster than expected decline of domestic production and the extensive damage to Gulf of Mexico infrastructure by Katrina and Rita. This year is the year that the bright future of gas-fired power plants met an untimely death, which begs the question of what will replace it – wind (but to what extent?), coal (but whither emissions and global warming?), nuclear (but what do we do with the waste?).

But the lessons on the oil front are not very encouraging.

DailyKos