I expect we'll see much greater volatility in the near future, in part because the Bad People have likely figured out how easy it is to cause the West economic pain by staging a high profile (even if unsuccessful) attack on the oil infrastructure.

If I expect resources to be scarce in, say, one to five years, I will be willing to pay more for it NOW. As traders say, it's already in the price.

If the world believes we are past peak, they would be willing to pay 10$ gasoline prices NOW - simply because it will be harder to get in 5 years. That means that the price that it will take to produce the stuff in 5 years are already considered NOW and do not need to be put into the futures' prices which are due in five years. The futures prices will therefore remain a sort of running average of past prices MINUS what you would get by putting your money into bonds.

That is why we see a long period of constant futures in the 1990s for instance. Price went up and down, but the average was mostly the same - thus the futures (five years' difference, for instance) remained mostly the same.

If you see the futures price as "present expectations of the price in the future", you will be led down the wrong path. PRESENT PRICES already have the present expectations of future availability priced in.

If you try to use the future's price to tell us something about the future, you fall into the thought trap that Greenspan fell into a while back - that PO doesn't exist because the future markets don't show it. As he made his comments (not quite two years ago, if I remember correctly), oil was priced somewhere under 40$.