End of oil is inevitable but don’t worry just as yet

Well, it isn’t $100 per barrel of oil that is the imaginably far-off price ceiling imagined by analysts and industry insiders.

Now people are blithely tossing out the possibility of $200 per barrel crude.

An analyst with Goldman Sachs told Bloomberg that oil could hit the $150 to $200 mark within the next two years, and the bank is now saying that $140 may be a realistic price as soon as the second half of 2008.

Heck, the price was already headed for $133 a barrel in early trading on Monday.

With the summer travel season just kicking off in the United States, the US dollar’s steady decline and Saudi Arabia grudgingly agreeing to produce a meagre 300,000 barrels a day even as the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) continue to collectively twiddle their thumbs, we seem to have a perfect price storm in the making.

Gulf News