欧佩克缺乏控制意味着油价将狂飙

随着全球石油市场（更不用说更广泛的经济）在学习，真正的游戏规则改变者并不是北美页岩油热潮. 问题是，已经没有一个供应商集团愿意或能够稳定价格。其结果是，当欧佩克产油国被要求平衡供需时，油价大幅波动。尽管有悖常理，但从价格稳定的角度来看，唯一比欧佩克管理市场更糟糕的是欧佩克没有管理市场。

这是《盗梦空间》以来,经常被遗忘the modern oil market in the 1850s, oil’s extremely low short-run price elasticity of supply and demand has subjected prices to large swings when fundamentals are unbalanced. For both producers and consumers of oil, this boom-bust tendency is unacceptable. For most of the oil market’s history, a dominant swing supplier or group of suppliers has emerged to attempt to suppress this intrinsic volatility by modulating supply. John D. Rockefeller Sr.’s Standard Oil Co. was the first such main oil producer in the late 1800s. The period before and after his era of control saw wild price volatility. Starting in the 1930s the Texas Railroad Commission and Seven Sisters oil companies managed the market for 40 years until the U.S. ran out of spare capacity in 1972, at which point OPEC, and specificallySaudi Arabia，接过缰绳。利雅得的闲置产能在2008年耗尽，当时利雅得无法阻止油价飙升至每桶145美元，导致需求激增，此后不久油价暴跌至每桶34美元。石油输出国组织（OPEC）和沙特阿拉伯（Saudi Arabia）是欧佩克的主要参与者，此后，没有美国产量飙升的帮助，欧佩克和沙特阿拉伯无法对油价设定上限，2014年6月油价曾达到每桶115美元。正如去年11月所表明的那样，欧佩克不愿意在油价下设定下限。

With no supply manager in charge for the first time since the 1920s, the market has entered an era of heightened proneness to large swings — a dynamic similar to riding Space Mountain, the thrilling for some and terrifying for many roller coaster ride familiar to generations of Disney theme park visitors. Until this past summer, the Space Mountain view about oil prices appeared misplaced. From 2011 until then, volatility had fallen to lows not seen since the early 1980s owing to a fluke combination of tepid global growth in gross domestic product, surging U.S. production, destocking and massive central bank easing.

如果说价格和2011年到2014年年中的任何一次迪斯尼之旅相似的话，那就是这个世界很小。但是，疲软的宏观经济前景和利比亚原油产量的回升，使得今年夏天的天平出现了供过于求的局面。一旦海湾阿拉伯国家合作委员会（俗称海湾合作委员会，简称海湾合作委员会）的欧佩克产油国打破了人们对今年秋季减产的普遍预期，价格行为就又回到了无管理市场的典型波动性。

油价现在处于内爆状态，令经验丰富的专家和外界观察人士都感到震惊。海湾生产国，主要是沙特阿拉伯，已经加倍承诺维持目前的产量水平，坚持他们的竞争对手（其中许多恰好是他们的地缘政治对手）首先削减产量。尽管经常被描述为美国页岩油和欧佩克之间的竞争，但实际上更多的是欧佩克内部的冲突，海湾逊尼派生产国沙特阿拉伯、科威特和阿联酋与什叶派伊拉克和伊朗争夺亚洲市场份额。在没有降级迹象的情况下，除非发生重大地缘政治动荡，否则商业库存和浮动库存将朝着反季节的大规模建设方向发展，到2015年第二季度末，可能出现创纪录的高供应，迫使现货价格远低于50美元，进入30美元的区域。

我们预计，油价可能只会稳定在30至50美元的区间，这将削弱对页岩油和其他高成本供应项目的新投资，同时向伊拉克等依赖石油收入的产油国传递强烈信息，伊朗和俄罗斯表示，如果他们希望像沙特阿拉伯这样的海湾产油国合作，使原油价格接近每桶100美元，他们最好削减供应。

But looking down the road, when GDP growth picks up, get ready for the mother of all price rebounds. The duration and amplitude of its bottoming out will depend in part on the timing and amount of cuts extracted from non-GCC producers but primarily on the return of healthy GDP growth. The pace of efficiency gains has been slower than widely believed, and therefore demand growth will be larger than consensus expects. Given oil demand’s high sensitivity to income growth, when GDP picks up toward trend levels, oil demand will rise sharply.

If, as most observers expect, net supply growth reaches 1 million to 1.5 million barrels per day, then once-accumulated inventories would be worked off, the small remaining OPEC spare production capacity would be exhausted, and oil prices would have to rise substantially to balance the market. Now that the oil price war of 2014 is about to lay waste to capital expenditure, this implies even higher oil prices when economic growth recovers.

关键的不确定性在于全球经济复苏的时机。尽管增长比人们普遍认为的更为迫切，但国际货币基金组织（imf）的预测可能过于乐观。中国目前对2015年全球GDP增长率3.8%的预测可能会下调。官方对2015年石油需求的预测已经大幅下调，我们还没有出现增长恐慌。但每当世界经济增长率最终接近4%而不是3%时，油价就有可能回到每桶90美元的水平，而且随着未来的动荡，油价可能会远高于每桶100美元。

在太空山上，攀登和下降一样令人毛骨悚然。

罗伯特·麦克纳利is president and founder of theRapidan Group,an energy consulting firm, in Bethesda, Maryland.

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