After a dip down to below $121, oil prices have now climbed back to just over $124.
I found this interesting parallel on the Oil Drum Europe, with Oil depletion and Whale oil.
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3960
....historical data for whaling tell us that an exponential rise of the prices is not the only feature of the post-peak market. The prominent feature is, rather, the presence of very strong price oscillations. We can attribute these oscillations to a general characteristic of systems dominated by feedback and time delays. Prices are supposed to mediate between offer and demand, but tend to overcorrect on one side or another. The result is an alternance of demand destruction (high prices) and offer destruction (low prices).
What we are seeing at present with crude oil is, most likely, one of these price spikes. Eventually, it will overdo its job of curbing demand and turn into a price collapse. We can imagine how, in the collapsing phase, everyone will start screaming that the "oil crisis" of the first decades of 21st century was just a hoax, just as it was said for the crisis of the 1970s. Then, a new upward spike will start.
Here, too, the history of whaling can teach us something in terms of the difficulty that people have in understanding depletion. In Starbuck's book (on whale oil 1887), we never find mention that whales had become scarce. On the contrary, the decline of the catch was attributed to such factors as the whales' "shyness" and the declining "character of the men engaged". Starbuck seems to think that the crisis of the whaling industry of his times can be solved by means of governmental subsidies. Some things never change. "
