The latest rumblings in the Yukos affair this week have raised more questions about OPEC's ability to control oil prices and further strengthened a widely-held view that a US$50 barrel might not be too far in the future.
OPEC, which has in the past been known to keep a tighter ship, has recently issued a string of contradictory statements which question its ability to react to the current ructions.
Its president Purnomo Yusgiantoro began by putting the wind up traders by declaring the current rates "mad" and adding that even Saudi Arabia, fittest of all OPEC's members, could not increase production in the immediate future.
Prices surged as experts interpreted the declaration as a sign there was no margin for safety available should a country default, an eventuality that gains extra significance in the context of Iraq, Nigeria, Venezuela and Russia, where oil giant Yukos staggers from one setback to the next.
Yusgiantoro attempted to make amends by saying shortly afterwards that OPEC did in fact have spare production capacity of up to 1.5 million barrels per day, before adding that whatever happened, no decision would be taken before the organisation's next meeting in mid-September.
The inconsistency must also be seen in the light of a clear error in evaluation in April which resulted in OPEC reducing its production ceiling by 1 million barrels a day, even though the price of oil was already above US$30 a barrel.
It also led analysts and consumers to doubt OPEC's determination to genuinely stabilise the market. Since then the cartel has performed a U-turn, raising its quota several times.
These difficulties, compounded by the increasingly tenuous state of Yukos and the concerns swirling round a referendum in Venezuela that could lead to a change of regime, sent oil prices spiralling upwards.
On Friday they were hovering around the US$41.5 per barrel mark in London and were at an historic peak of US$44.77 in New York.
Analysts said there was little sign of any real let-up for several months given the patent imbalance between supply and demand.
Indeed, demand looks set to grow sharply in the months ahead (an increase of 3.2 percent to 81.4 million barrels a day), nudged on by the recovery of the world economy and by rapid growth in India and China. Supply, on the other hand, already virtually at a standstill, will almost certainly not keep up.
Experts rule out another major oil crisis, even though many now accept that the US$50 a barrel price is on the cards.
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