EU energy commissioner: oil could reach 200 dollars a barrel

Oil prices could reach 200 dollars a barrel, the European Union’s energy commissioner said in an interview published Monday in Spain, two days ahead of an OPEC meeting to decide daily output levels.

“When I arrived at the European Commission in 2004, a barrel of oil cost 52 dollars. It has doubled in three years. We can’t rule out that in 2011 it will be at 200 dollars,” Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs told business daily El Economista.
“What I am saying is, in part, a joke, but it shouldn’t surprise us,” he said, adding that when US investment bank Goldman Sachs predicted oil could reach 100 dollars three years ago, “everyone took it as a joke.”

“We can’t rule out 200 dollars because in the last two years, all of us have been completely mistaken, thinking that what is in fact happening now was impossible,” Piebalgs said.

AFP