This from Bloomberg:

“Crude oil will collapse to $20 a barrel this year as the recession takes a deeper toll on fuel demand, according to academic and former U.S. government adviser Philip Verleger.

A crude surplus of 100 million barrels will accumulate by the end of the year, straining global storage capacity and sending prices to a seven-year low, said Verleger, who correctly predicted in 2007 that prices were set to exceed $100. Supply is outpacing demand by about 1 million barrels a day, he said.”

Of course, Goldman Sachs says:

“At the other end of the spectrum from Verleger, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. predicted in a report yesterday oil will rally to $85 a barrel by the end of the year, and recommended that clients buy futures contracts for delivery in December 2011.”

Sorta makes you wonder if these guys are reading the same data.  It baffles me how Goldman, a for-profit bank, and Verlanger, who is a former member of a government agency group, can arrive at such polarized conclusions.

Then there is this little tidbit:

“Exxon Mobil Corp., the largest U.S. oil company, may be fined more than $1 billion for “malicious” sabotage of wells to prevent other producers from tapping fields it no longer wanted, the Texas General Land Office said…”, the article goes to say that Exxon is accused “of plugging abandoned wells with trash, sludge, explosives and cement plugs. The barriers made it impossible for other producers to revive the wells, Patterson said in a statement he gave to Bloomberg News yesterday.

Note:  All these stories appeared today in Bloomberg News.

The point is a comical if sad one, and one I have been convinced existed for many years, and it is that we are in poor control of our petroleum supply and prices because control has been ceded to irresponsible corporations and countries whose interests have little to do with the well being of the United States.  I wish there were some mechanism to thwart the obvious manipulation of oil prices in the US, short of nationalization (which is, in my opinion, unthinkable).  But trusting our oil supply to the likes of Exxon Mobil, Saudi Arabia and the cabal at OPEC is akin to trusting organized pirates, which they are.