The Oil Drum

1. oil companies are manipulating prices
2. speculators are driving prices up

"To increase by 500,000 or one million barrels, do you believe today it will bring back the price?" Attiyah asked. "I don't think so," he said, emphasizing his view that the price of oil had become almost wholly decoupled from supplies. Financial players "lost a lot of money on real estate, shares and bonds, and then they jumped to commodities," including oil, Attiyah said.
Herald Tribune  

This is a guest post by Shunyata. Shunyata is a manager of financial derivatives with training in financial engineering, actuarial science, statistics, and mechanical engineering. While he does not work directly with commodity markets, his background in financial engineering gives him insight into the operation of oil markets that may be helpful.

The observations below represents Shunyata's opinions based on his study of commodity derivatives to protect his personal interests. Commodity derivatives are exceedingly complicated, and his direct expertise is with respect to financial derivatives. This post is not intended to represent investment advice.

What Can the Commodity Market Tell Us about Peak Oil?

Market Consensus

A common view is that market prices reflect the market consensus about future prospects. This is a dangerous misunderstanding from several standpoints.

Consensus is an equilibrium statement, but equilibrium is non-existent in reality. There is the obvious problem of new information constantly disrupting the market. More importantly, the market contains a hidden, complex structure of players:

• There are large, in-the-know entities who act opportunistically, seemingly at random;

• There are hedgers who react to market moves mechanically and in unison (no disparagement intended);

• There are diverse small players who respond slowly in diverse ways, etc.

The following is from guest contributor Jeff Vail. Jeff is an intelligence analyst focusing on energy and infrastructure-related issues. He is a graduate of the US Air Force Academy and a former USAF Intelligence Officer. Jeff previously wrote on the The Oil Drum about the increasing violence in Nigeria.

He discusses an interesting phenomenon with respect to energy futures prices, that long dated futures are limited in how much they can go up (but not down) based on arbitrage principles. Because the price of distant oil futures quickly rise alongside spot market prices when spot markets are moved by short-term events, we can infer that major producers such as Saudi Arabia think that the future price of oil will be much higher than the price at which distant futures are currently trading. This provides further support to the theory that they don’t believe their own statements on their future production or on the future price band for crude oil. Jeff's post is under the fold.

This post will provide a graphical update on what has been a roller coaster ride in the natural gas market over the past 12 months, and a steep plummet of late. Natural gas prices have dropped by 50% in the last month, and over 70% from their highs earlier in the year. The warmest winter on record and not a single rig-damaging hurricane have combined to create record gas in storage, thereby reducing price demand for the marginal unit. Yet, production is flat with last year despite significant more drilling and rigs allocated to the commodity. The current situation is thus one of short term plenty and long term supply concern. If longer term predictions of reduced supply and accelerated well depletion are correct, we should be seeing some of the major producers reduce rig counts at these levels, or shut-in their production with intent to sell it higher in the future. This post examines the supply/demand equation for natural gas in the US, the NG futures strip, and the implications going forward of higher price volatility in this important commodity.

There is a pretty good piece on MSNBC that explains how gas prices are set. It is written in a "FAQ" format and does quite a good job of breaking this down for the layperson. I think some of the material may have actually creeped into a report on Friday's NBC Nightly News (link to netcast—not sure if it works).

Ultimately, the price of gas prices is set by the price of crude oil on the futures market, which (I believe) is out of the hands of grandstanding politicians. If this much gets through to the public, I'd say we've made progress. The problem however, is that, in the eyes of the public, we've just replace one mystery (gas prices), with another (crude oil prices).

The fact is that the futures markets is opaque. Sure, financial news services come up with narratives about why the futures do what they do, but they never really cite any evidence for them. Does anyone, even the wise readers of the The Oil Drum, really know the true reasons why crude oil prices are high? Is it because the supply of crude oil is diminishing? Anxiety over Iran and Nigeria? Mere speculation by investors? Chances are that it's all of these things. Investors do things for all kinds of reasons, and they certainly don't act as a monolithic block.

http://www.theoildrum.com/tag/gas_prices (this link will take you to all of our stories on gas prices which go in to a lot greater depth than this post...)

Update [2006-4-22 13:3:39 by Super G]: As pointed out in the comments, the switchover from MTBE to ethanol [as well as the annual transition from winter blend to summer blend] is also contributing to higher prices in the short-term.