History is a funny thing. On one hand it seems so static and unchanging; “that is exactly how and why that happened,” we say to ourselves. But on the other hand it is always changing. Every moment we are creating new memories that effectively change the past, new perspectives are shared amongst friends and propagated through the media, new technology illuminates previously hidden details. As I said, funny.
But we’re not here to talk philosophy (or psychology or whatever). We’re all here trying to figure out what to expect from the future of the oil industry, and, for most of us, the next few months are a confusing muddle of maybe this/maybe that.
Yesterdays Wall Street Journal article Here’s Where Forecasters Think Oil Is Heading had the following image that I found very interesting.
These forecasters are the folks with all the financial data from all the industries – presumably they can see demand and supply and storage and hedges and tie it all together – and they are all over the map. The only thing they seem to agree on is that the price of a barrel of oil won’t stay this low for long, with at least a partial recovery by 2016. So those of you playing in oil futures might try aiming for next year.
And if these Wall Street predictions are accurate, future academic papers and wikipedia pages will maybe look at this March, April and May as the big turning point.
Every Self-Help book and blog will spend a fair amount of time discussing the power of positive thinking, and the domestic Oil and Gas industry has certainly maintained a strong positivity about recovery – Harold Hamm’s Cowboyistan Manifesto comes to mind.
This week a few analyses have come up that are quite encouraging in the face of all the “storage capacity, strong dollar, lack of exports, weak demand” doom and gloom of recent months.
A month or so ago, Gaurav Agnihotri posted A Brief History of Oil over on Oil and Gas IQ and that got us thinking about the visual possibilities of a historical breakdown, so a definite hat tip goes to him and also to the folks at Oilpro, where we almost certainly first stumbled across the article.