It's of particular interest to ask how they did last year. The January 2005 Short Term Energy Outlook includes some choice quotes such as:

WTI prices fell by $10 per barrel on average during the past two months due to: the ongoing restoration of oil production in the Gulf of Mexico shut in due to Hurricane Ivan, unseasonably warm weather in the United States, and rising U.S. and OECD commercial oil inventories in general. This Outlook extends the projection period through 2006. EIA's initial assessment is that WTI prices are likely to remain in the $42?$43 per barrel range (on average) throughout 2005?2006.

Oops. It's especially instructive to look at their figure 2, in which they quote a two standard deviation error bar that runs around $32-$52. Ie they thought the probability of $60 oil was negligible (I won't hold the $70 hurricane price against them since they had an explicit caveat about not including major supply disruptions.

Working gas in storage is estimated to have totaled 2,698 billion cubic feet at the end of December. This figure is 5 percent higher than one year ago and 12 percent higher than the five?year average. With the heating season now more than half over and ample storage, natural gas prices are likely to ease over the next several months. Henry Hub prices are expected to average $5.77 per mcf in 2005.

Oops again.

Domestic natural gas production in 2005 is projected to increase by 1.7 percent from 2004 levels, partly due to high gas?directed drilling rates and partly due to continued recovery in the Gulf of Mexico from the effects of Hurricane Ivan. Steady increases in liquefied natural gas imports, restrained export growth, and carryover from the robust storage levels noted above are expected to contribute to moderate improvement in the supply picture in 2005.

It's also interesting to look at Figure 16, where they expected 2005 to be the first year in 30 odd in which domestic oil production increased. The link is a PDF and I don't have a quick way to get the figure out of it, but it looks exactly like this one, except for the 2005 bar going up instead of down.

Hope springs eternal at the EIA.