Continuing our energy reading, we came across Michael Lynch, of Strategic Energy & Economic Research in Amherst, Mass. In addition to being an oil bear, seeing oil going to potentially $45 in 2007 and perhaps even hitting $20 briefly in 2008, we also learned that he may be one of the toughest ones around. This MIT-educated oil bear once vanquished a burglar with a sword.
His abiding faith in technology's ability to wring oil from the most tucked-away places have put him on the outer margins of conventional thinking. He says, "I've been a gadfly since I started."
A gutsy one, too. In 1981, while living in Boston, Lynch got into a 3 a.m. tangle with two burglars in his apartment. Stabbed in the chest, knocked unconscious with a bottle of triple sec from his liquor cabinet, Lynch woke to find one of the culprits still on the scene. So he grabbed a sword he kept behind his bedroom door and--still wrapped in his plaid bathrobe--whacked the guy. In the hospital, he identified the assailant by the tattoos on his arms. The incident triggered a mild form of posttraumatic stress that he keeps in check with low doses of antidepressants. The pills, he insists, do not affect his outlook on the long-term health of the world oil supply.
Mr. Lynch's firm adds a second Massachusetts data point to the oil bearishness we reported on from Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) back in June 2005. From our CERA post:
"The balance of supply over demand has the potential to expand significantly over the next five years, and this could drive oil prices to the downside. If demand growth averages a relatively strong 2.2% through 2010, prices could weaken from recent record highs and slip well below $40/bbl as 2007-08 nears."
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