Gas could burst Peak Oil theorists

As much an art as a science, oil price forecasting is a major preoccupation for many energy consultants. But whose forecast is the most reliable? After all, fortunes hang on the answer.

Yet when looking ahead more than four years, almost all oil price forecasts over the past 40 years have been wrong, according to Dr Ole Gunnar Austvik, the head of research at Lillehammer University College in Norway.

As it turns out, the flawed forecasts all predicted upwards price trends, whereas inflation-adjusted oil prices actually fell for two decades from the early 1980s.

It was only over the past decade that a seven-year price rally challenged that. A related question, now that oil prices have crashed and partially rebounded, is whether some of the old forecasts are about to be vindicated, or whether the current period of price volatility will run its course, eventually leaving crude lower.

The National