Let's briefly review the rising process of international oil prices in recent years. 200 1, 9 1 1 or so, and the oil price at that time was about 20 dollars per barrel. By the beginning of 2003, oil prices had risen by nearly $30/barrel. One year later, at the beginning of 2004, it broke through the $40/barrel mark. By the beginning of 2006, the oil price began to approach the mark of $60/barrel. In the past 2007, it broke through the barrier of $80 and $90/barrel, and reached the barrier of 100 in early 2008. Of course, the recent international oil price breakthrough of 100 yuan mark is contingent, mainly due to the negative market factors. For example, the armed unrest in Nigeria's oil port city in early 2008 made people worry that the oil supply of the world's eighth largest oil exporter may be further reduced. At the same time, figures released by us energy information administration show that US crude oil inventories have been declining for seven consecutive weeks, and have fallen to the lowest level since 5,438+10 in June 2005. However, there is inevitability in contingency, because among the supply and demand factors that affect oil prices, including demand, output, international policy, finance and investment (speculation) derivative factors, there are indeed factors that promote oil prices to continue to rise and remain high. Let's analyze them one by one. First look at the world economy and oil demand. We know that this round of high oil prices is not a short-term change caused by unexpected events, but is strongly promoted by the rapid and general growth of the world economy, especially that of developing countries. Research shows that in recent years, the GDP growth of developing countries is obviously faster than that of developed countries, and the oil consumption of developing countries is also obviously faster than that of developed countries, and the growth rate of oil consumption in developing countries is obviously higher than that of GDP. The World Energy Outlook of the International Energy Agency predicts that the continuous growth of world oil demand may lead to more serious supply problems around 20 15. Among them, at least half of the demand growth comes from developing countries. Some organizations such as ExxonMobil predict that 80% of the global oil demand will come from developing countries. When considering oil demand, transportation systems, especially automobiles, need special mention. Take the United States as an example The United States has nearly 300 million cars and is called "the country on wheels". American oil consumption accounts for 25% of global oil consumption, but oil production only accounts for about 9% of global oil production. 97% of the fuel of the American economy, especially the American transportation system, is oil. The soaring car ownership in China has also made oil consumption strong. There are nearly 20.5 million cars in China, which has tripled compared with the early 1990s. In recent years, the growth rate of automobile sales has been above 20%. Since 1993, it has been a net importer of oil. At present, nearly half of the oil demand depends on imports. As for neighboring Japan and South Korea, 100% of the oil is imported, which highlights the huge demand for oil by Asian economic locomotives. Secondly, look at the supply and reserves of oil. The overall situation is that the growth of global oil supply cannot keep up with the growth of demand. The shortage of world oil supply will intensify in the short term. Some scholars describe it pessimistically, that is, for every two barrels of oil consumed in the world, only one barrel of new oil is found, because the production capacity of most mature oil fields in the world is in a downward trend. The United States has developed most of the traditional oil fields. British North Sea oil production began to decline from 1999. Mexican oil fields also reached the peak of production in 2006. The seven major oil fields in Saudi Arabia account for 90% of the national oil supply, but their production capacity is also declining year by year. In China, the output of Daqing Oilfield, which accounts for about 30% of the total oil output, is also declining at an average annual rate of 2-3%. The output of Liaohe Oilfield, the second largest oilfield, has also been declining. A similar situation is happening almost all over the world: after reaching the highest point, the output faces a two-fold decline. The speed of decline is faster than expected. Of course, when we say global oil shortage and production decline, we mainly mean the reduction of reserves and production capacity of high-efficiency and low-cost light oil fields (traditional oil fields) with superior exploitation conditions, good natural oil quality and high economic value, and we do not deny the existence and expansion potential of other types of oil fields and other oil production forms in the world. In fact, oil prices are responsive. When the oil price is low, other types of oil fields and other forms of oil production other than traditional oil fields have no development value, and vice versa. For example, traditional oil fields have low oil production costs. According to the calculation of the US Department of Energy, including the exploration, exploitation and transportation costs, the production cost of traditional oil fields is generally within 10 USD/barrel, and the theoretical selling price should be between 40 USD/barrel. In countries with particularly good oil production conditions, such as Saudi Arabia, the production cost of crude oil can be as low as $ 3-4 per barrel-there, as long as people add water pressure to the bottom of large oil fields, light oil with good oil quality and high value will float to the surface. Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer such high-quality large oil fields, which can't keep up with the growth of demand. Therefore, in view of the narrow mutual influence of oil demand, supply and price, there are three sentences that can be summarized: first, the rapid growth of oil demand drives oil prices to rise continuously; Second, the decline in traditional oilfield production has pushed up oil prices; Third, the rise in oil prices drives the expansion of other types of oil fields and other forms of oil production besides traditional oil fields, thus alleviating the contradiction between oil supply and demand and curbing the rise in high oil prices. Typical oil fields other than traditional oil fields include oil shale, oil sands and special oil fields distributed in high latitude cold regions in the north. Like the former, oil shale looks like ordinary rock, but it will ooze oil bubbles when heated. The United States, China, Brazil, Estonia, Australia and other countries have such oil shale mines. The United States has an exclusive advantage, with more than 72% of the world's oil shale reserves. Just under the surface of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, there are 2 trillion barrels of reserves, 8 times that of Saudi Arabia, 2 times that of Iraq, 2 times that of Kuwait and 22 times that of Iran. Its scale exceeds the proven crude oil reserves of all traditional oil fields in the world today. As the latter, Canada and other countries have rich oil sands resources in northern Alberta and other regions, with a production capacity of tens of billions of barrels of oil. In the cold northwest of Canada, a special oil field with a reserve of 40 billion barrels was discovered as early as the 1970s. Its uniqueness lies in its harsh climate and harsh mining conditions-it is a special area, covered with icebergs in winter and swamps in summer. In winter, the temperature can drop to minus sixty or seventy degrees, which makes people and machines face a very dangerous and difficult state when they work there. But in terms of technical possibility and feasibility, we are now fully capable of exploiting oil shale, oil sands and special oil fields with high latitudes in the north. However, from the perspective of reality and urgency, whether to carry out actual mining activities to increase oil supply depends on whether the oil price conforms to the mining cost and profit space. It is estimated that the exploitation cost of oil shale is about $25 per barrel, and the exploitation cost of oil sands and oil fields in northern high latitudes is not far from this value (there is a significant cost difference with traditional oil fields). When the oil price is 35-40 USD/barrel, no company will spend money to invest in production. However, when the oil price rises to 75-80 dollars/barrel, many companies will actively intervene in production to obtain real profits. The so-called other forms of petroleum production mainly include a technological process of CTL. The germination of this technology actually began as early as Germany during World War II. At that time, the traditional practice was to convert coal into gas (carbon monoxide and hydrogen) in the first technical process, and then convert the gas into diesel, gasoline or other related products in the second process. The factor that restricts the reality and urgency of this technology application is also the profit space between cost and oil price. Because the production cost of coal-to-oil technology is 30-40 dollars per barrel, many companies will not really apply this technology to increase the supply of oil market until the oil price rises to 75-80 dollars per barrel. However, when the price is in place and the market conditions are mature, the potential of coal-to-oil technology is very great. According to Pentagon estimates, the United States alone has coal resources that can produce 964 billion barrels of oil. Its production capacity is larger than the traditional oil fields with about 685 billion barrels of oil in the whole Middle East. From the above analysis, we know that according to the existing oil demand, supply conditions and price factors, when the market oil price rises to 75-80 USD/barrel, although there will be a time lag, the world oil will have a significant expansion of oil production from other types of oil fields and other forms, including traditional oil fields, thus greatly increasing supply, alleviating the contradiction between supply and demand and slowing down the price increase. In this sense, we agree with us energy information administration's prediction that in 2008-2009, the world oil price may moderately drop to about $80 per barrel. Of course, when oil prices fall or rise at a specific time, we should not only consider the narrow mutual influence of oil demand, supply and price, but also analyze the influence of broad factors such as international policy, finance, investment (speculative) derivatives. Of course, we believe that the narrow interaction of oil demand, supply and price plays a long-term and basic leading role in the decline of oil prices, and let's look at international policy and finance first. The policies of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Russia and other countries have great influence on the world oil supply, while the policies of the United States have great influence on the world oil demand. In the short term, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which accounts for about 40% of the global crude oil output, will not change its basic attitude of limiting the output of its member countries to prevent the oil price from falling. Russia, on the other hand, although Russia's oil production has expanded rapidly in the past few years due to rising oil prices and the progress of mining technology, and its output has surpassed that of Saudi Arabia, Russia is not interested in cooperating with western companies to expand oil production, and is more willing to share the huge benefits brought by rising oil prices with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. As a big oil consumer, the United States passed the new energy bill signed by President Bush in February 2007, and decided to change its long-term high dependence on oil. According to the new energy bill, by 2020, the fuel consumption of American cars must be reduced by 40% compared with the current one, and the use of renewable energy such as bioethanol must reach 36 billion gallons by 2022. The United States tries to influence the oil demand of western countries and even the whole world through this firm policy orientation. However, in American history, especially during President Nixon and President Carter, there were similar policies such as "getting rid of external energy dependence" and realizing "energy independence", but they never succeeded. The policy effect of President Bush's new energy bill remains to be seen. However, the failure of previous presidential policies is mostly caused by the low oil price in the international market (including the policy counterattack of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). However, judging from the results of lowering oil prices, it cannot be said that the policy is a complete failure. Finally, let's look at financial and investment (speculation) derivatives. Here, the most important thing is the depreciation of the dollar and the role of institutional investors such as the oil futures market and hedge funds. Of course, the continued depreciation of the US dollar will, in turn, push the price of oil denominated in US dollars to remain high. In fact, if we calculate the actual increase of oil prices in each year according to the depreciation of the dollar, we will find that they are only about 60% of the nominal increase. In the oil futures market, the investment (speculation) of some pension funds, public funds and hedge funds contributed to price fluctuations. According to the data of American market, non-commercial traders, mainly hedge funds, hold more than 30% of crude oil future positions and are very active. They have changed the traditional model that the oil market is dominated by oil producers and consumers. Any movement of hedge funds and investment banks will aggravate oil prices and market volatility. This is particularly noteworthy when explaining the short-term fluctuation of world oil prices, especially the increase in amplitude.