Over the years, oil price volatility has been a concern for producers and consumers
In case you are not skeptical about the ability of governments to understand what the oil price should be, the figure below shows the U.S. government’s purchases of oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and the oil price over time. The first 500 million barrels were purchased when the oil price was an average of $85/barrel , which might seem reasonable considering the price is now $80, but the average price since the SPR was created has been $63/barrel.
What’s worse is the irrepressible urge that official forecasters have to predict ever-higher prices. The IEA does have scenarios where climate change policies result in lower oil prices, but their standard expectation, given stated policies or announced plans, is for prices to be flat or increase over the longer term, as the figure below shows. The EIA is in rough agreement as are many other forecasters.
Over time, the psychology driving oil price forecasts has changed repeatedly, with the figure below highlighting the evolution of IEA price forecasts/scenarios. They are generally representative of the consensus at any given time, which demonstrates that the consensus tells us more about the desire of forecasters to cluster together than about the accuracy of their forecasts.Finally, the use of strategic reserves for short-term political gain is certainly inadvisable.
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