Like death and taxes, the price of oil is always with us. And like taxes, it may be President Barack Obama’s worst nightmare at election time next year.

Among forecasters, there is a sharp division between those who see an inexorable rise in the price of oil and those who believe it will stabilize about where it is now.

I received another scratchy, crackling cell phone call from my drilling buddy in the Texas natural gas fields today. You could almost choke from the dust on the line.

He told me that the BP Gulf disaster was turning the fundamental assumptions of the oil industry upside down, and that sharply higher oil prices were in the cards, probably $100/barrel by year end.

Back in the days when US oil demand controlled the price of oil, a massive recession in the United States would have sent oil to 12.00 dollars a barrel. That era, which ended last decade, was defined by ongoing spare capacity in OPEC, low-cost oil in Non-OPEC, and nascent demand for oil in the developing world. That was then, and this is now.

There still seems to be a deplorable uncertainty about the future price of the most important commodity in the world.