Future Prices and Availability of Transport Fuels

Daniel L. Greene
Additional contact information
Daniel L. Greene: Oak Ridge National Laboratory

No 2007/15, OECD/ITF Joint Transport Research Centre Discussion Papers from OECD Publishing

Abstract: It is a truism that future prices of energy for transportation will be determined by the forces of supply and demand. For transport fuels, these forces have entered a crucial phase that is likely to persist for several decades. Oil production from conventional resources outside of the OPEC countries will peak within a few years. Unconventional fossil resources that can be exploited at current prices, resources whose early development is already well underway, pose an even greater threat to the global climate. To bring these resources to the market at a rate to match the growth in demand for mobility fuels in the developed and developing economies will require massive, risky investments. Serious risks are posed by the environmental acceptability of these fuels and also by the fact that a sudden downturn in world oil prices would turn them into stranded assets. It is also a truism that no one can accurately predict the price of oil. Today, oil costs $70 per barrel. Ten years ago, it cost less than $20 per barrel. Twenty seven years ago oil prices peaked at $90 per barrel. Thirty-seven years ago oil cost only $10 per barrel and its price had been relatively stable for almost fifty years. Those who carefully craft future oil price scenarios know that they are not predicting but rather attempting to define alternative paths of central tendency. Even the best official oil price projections look nothing like the past thirty-five years of history. It is important to understand why this is so. Since 1972, world oil prices have been strongly and unpredictably influenced by the actions of the OPEC cartel. It is very likely that they will be for the next thirty years, as well.

Date: 2007-12-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1787/234584871680 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oec:itfaaa:2007/15-en

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OECD/ITF Joint Transport Research Centre Discussion Papers from OECD Publishing Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).